Cinemorphosis

Category: philosophy

  • Against Mythmaking 

    Against Mythmaking 

    In The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, Hyam Maccoby doesn’t treat Paul as a saintly architect of faith. Instead, he brands him a slick opportunist — a theological con artist who sidelined Jesus’ Jewish disciples and reinvented the movement to glorify himself. In Maccoby’s telling, Paul isn’t the earnest apostle of Sunday school murals; he’s a résumé-padding religious entrepreneur with a flair for self-promotion.

    Luke, author of Acts, doesn’t escape scrutiny either. To Maccoby, Luke plays the role of breathless publicist, polishing Paul into a heroic Hollywood lead — all charisma, no contradictions, halo firmly secured with narrative glue.

    Yet as I reread Maccoby, I can’t ignore the irony: in exposing Paul’s myth-making, Maccoby may be engaged in his own. If Luke sculpted Paul into a glowing protagonist, Maccoby chisels him into a grand villain — less apostle, more Bond antagonist with holy stationery.

    My relationship with Paul is messier than either portrait. At times he reads like a puffed-up moralist enthralled by his own authority; at other moments, he achieves startling spiritual clarity — like his definition of God as self-emptying love in Philippians. Myth-making, whether heroic or malicious, flattens figures like Paul into cardboard cutouts, sanding down the contradictions that make real people aggravating, compelling, and occasionally profound.

    So while Maccoby offers a seductive, neatly packaged explanation for Christianity’s break from Judaism — Paul scheming his way to divine stardom — it feels too tidy. Real history rarely sticks to clean villain-hero binaries. 

    My life would be defined by resolution and an ability to move on if I could see Paul that way Maccoby does, but before I can toss Paul into the narcissist bin and slam the lid, I have to admit that Maccoby — like Luke — might be seduced by narrative neatness. Paul’s letters show someone less like a cartoon schemer and more like a man painfully aware of his own weakness, insecurity, and failure. If he were a megalomaniac mastermind, he was spectacularly bad at the role: beaten, jailed, mocked, shipwrecked, chronically ill, and constantly sparring with congregations who treated him not like a guru but like the world’s most irritating substitute teacher. His theology isn’t the product of a slick PR machine; it reads like a bruised mystic wrestling with power, ego, and surrender. 

    You can see it in Paul’s grudging boasts, his trembling confessions, and his moments of ecstatic humility — that strange mix of cosmic ambition and self-annihilation that marks someone grappling with God, not angling for a corner office. 

    It may be comforting to imagine Paul as either saint or sociopath, but the textual record points to something far more inconvenient: a brilliant, exasperating, self-contradicting human being who stumbled toward transcendence while dragging his flaws behind him like rattling tin cans tied to a wedding bumper.

    In any event, I shall continue rereading Maccoby. His strident reaction to Paul continues to fascinate me.

  • What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    What True Crime Teaches That Fiction Won’t

    For the past few months, I’ve been devouring true crime docuseries with tireless fascination. The more I watch, the deeper my appetite grows—not for gore, but for the raw human stories that unspool behind every case. There is, of course, a price for such voyeurism. Nearly every episode revisits the same dark origins: homes scarred by domestic abuse, children numbed by neglect, and adults who turn to drugs and alcohol to quiet the pain. Whole worlds of criminality form around these wounds—ecosystems where cruelty becomes normal, even rational.

    Then there’s law enforcement. Most detectives and officers I see in these stories are decent, sharp-minded people pursuing justice through an endless fog of human wreckage. They face so much depravity that it exacts a psychic toll. They carry the collective sorrow of others, walking the earth with hearts cracked open by everything they’ve witnessed.

    There’s a strange repetition to these lives of crime—an awful sameness—but also a singular fingerprint on each story. Some criminals are narcissists, intoxicated by their own chaos. Others are the broken offspring of violence, haunted by demons they now unleash on others. Many strike out in panic, wielding a mallet where a scalpel would have sufficed.

    I’m reminded of Tolstoy’s line: “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” I’d transpose it this way: All paths to decency share a pattern—discipline, love, structure—but the paths to ruin twist in countless variations, each marked by a wound that never healed.

    This is what keeps me watching. Too many fictionalized crime dramas can’t resist the tidy seduction of redemption—some tearful confession, some sentimental coda of forgiveness. True crime spares me that. It denies me comfort. No background music softens the horror, no clever dialogue redeems it. These stories show the human condition not as we wish it to be but as it is: excruciating, broken, and endlessly complex.

    In that sense, I find myself siding less with Steven Pinker’s optimism and more with Robert Kaplan’s realism. Pinker argues that humanity is improving—that violence is receding and irrational behavior is on the decline. Kaplan, in Wasteland: A World in Permanent Crisis, sees something else entirely: that the struggle between good and evil is eternal, and evil often enjoys the advantage because it fights without restraint and acts as if it has nothing to lose. Kaplan isn’t a pessimist. He’s a realist.

    If I’m to prepare for life, I’d rather confront the world as Kaplan does—without illusion, without sentimentality, without anesthetic. Pinker’s optimism feels like comfort food for the mind. Kaplan, like true crime, gives me the bitter taste of reality—and that’s the kind of nourishment that lasts.

  • Thou Shalt Remember That Silence Can Wound More Deeply Than Cruelty

    Thou Shalt Remember That Silence Can Wound More Deeply Than Cruelty

    It was a Friday night at Castro Valley High, that weekly pageant of teenage aggression disguised as school spirit. The bleachers were packed with hormonal thunder; the air reeked of nacho cheese and Axe body spray. And then the rain came, that democratic force that flattens everyone’s hair and dignity alike.

    Across the stands, I saw her—the girl the boys called Tasmanian Devil. I didn’t know her name. No one did. She was a broad-shouldered girl with a face that inspired the cruel kind of laughter—the kind that hides insecurity behind volume. Her twin brother was in the special ed class with her, and their father, the school’s enormous janitor, lumbered around campus in denim overalls so faded they looked ghostly. His ears were so large they could have doubled as warning flags—and he had passed them on to his children, a hereditary curse of ridicule.

    They lived in a trailer next to the football field, an eternal reminder that some people never get to leave campus. That night she sat alone in the bleachers while the rain came down in cold, merciless sheets. Her hair clung to her forehead like seaweed, and black mascara streamed down her face like ink from a wounded pen.

    She stared out at the field with a look that broke something inside me—a look that said, I know the joke, and I know I’m the punchline. I know no one will ever love me, and I will always be an outsider.

    I wanted to call her over, to hand her my jacket, to do anything that resembled decency—but I did nothing. I sat there with my friends, pretending to watch the game, while she drowned in rain and loneliness.

    That night, guilt chewed through me like battery acid. I told Master Po about it—my silence, my self-loathing.

    “Master Po, I can’t forgive myself for doing nothing.”

    He looked at me the way only the wise can—equal parts compassion and indictment.

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “being angry with yourself achieves nothing. Flogging yourself achieves nothing. Shoveling hatred over yourself achieves nothing. If you wish to help those who have no place in this world, you must first make peace with yourself. The wise help others not because they are saints, but because they are whole.”

    I lay awake that night thinking about the girl in the rain—how she seemed to know her fate, and how I had rehearsed mine: a spectator of suffering, paralyzed by self-awareness. It was the night I learned the cruelest sin isn’t mockery. It’s inaction dressed up as reflection.

  • Thou Shalt Remember That Unsolicited Advice Is a Sacred Path to Humiliation

    Thou Shalt Remember That Unsolicited Advice Is a Sacred Path to Humiliation

    It was junior year, and I was inspecting the high school football team’s weight room—a dank temple of testosterone and tobacco spit. As a self-anointed expert (and Junior Olympic Weightlifting champion, lest anyone forget), I felt entitled to critique everything: the dumbbell selection, the ergonomics, the hygiene, the very air of the place. The floor looked like it had been carpeted with sunflower shells and Copenhagen runoff.

    I had just begun my sermon on the spiritual poverty of their equipment when the team’s starting linebacker, Erik Simonson—a slab of muscle with the conversational subtlety of a freight train—paused mid–military press. His gray-blue eyes locked on me like radar.

    “Is someone paying you to be an asshole,” he said evenly, “or are you doing volunteer work?”

    The weight room erupted. Even I laughed, because the line was perfect—surgical in its cruelty, poetic in its timing. But laughter has an aftertaste, and when I got home that night, the sting of public mockery still clung to me. I turned to my spiritual advisor, Master Po.

    “Master Po,” I said, “why did I invite that kind of humiliation? My criticisms were valid.”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, sipping tea with an aggravating serenity, “you must not go through life believing people crave your opinions. You are not a paid social commentator, though I know your heart yearns to be one.”

    “But weren’t my criticisms legitimate?” I persisted.

    “Legitimacy,” said Po, “is irrelevant. The truth is like chili powder—best applied sparingly. Even those who beg for feedback rarely mean it. They desire flattery dressed as honesty. Therefore, you must learn the art of selective silence. Speak briefly, and when possible, not at all.”

    I sighed. “But I love the sound of my own voice.”

    Po smiled the smile of a man who’s been disappointed by many students before me. “Yes,” he said, “but what sounds like sweet music to your ears may strike others as the shriek of ignorance, emotional poverty, and uninvited arrogance.”

    The next day, I returned to the weight room and said nothing. The linebackers grunted and lifted. I stood in silence, spiritually enlightened and socially intact—a monk in a monastery of iron plates.

  • The Gospel of De-Skilling: When AI Turns Our Minds into Mashed Potatoes

    The Gospel of De-Skilling: When AI Turns Our Minds into Mashed Potatoes

    Kwame Anthony Appiah, in “The Age of De-Skilling,” poses a question that slices to the bone of our moment: Will artificial intelligence expand our minds or reduce them to obedient, gelatinous blobs? The creeping decay of competence and curiosity—what he calls de-skilling—happens quietly. Every time AI interprets a poem, summarizes a theory, or rewrites a sentence for us, another cognitive muscle atrophies. Soon, we risk becoming well-polished ghosts of our former selves. The younger generation, raised on this digital nectar, may never build those muscles at all. Teachers who lived through both the Before and After Times can already see the difference in their classrooms: the dimming spark, the algorithmic glaze in the eyes.

    Yet Appiah reminds us that all progress extracts a toll. When writing first emerged, the ancients panicked. In Plato’s Phaedrus, King Thamus warned that this new technology—writing—would make people stupid. Once words were carved into papyrus, memory would rot, dialogue would wither, nuance would die. The written word, Thamus feared, would make us forgetful and isolated. And in a way, he was right. Writing didn’t make us dumb, but it did fundamentally rewire how we think, remember, and converse. Civilization gained permanence and lost immediacy in the same stroke.

    Appiah illustrates how innovation often improves our craft while amputating our pride in it. A pulp mill worker once knew by touch and scent when the fibers were just right. Now, computers do it better—but the hands are idle. Bakers once judged bread by smell, color, and instinct; now a touchscreen flashes “done.” Precision rises, but connection fades. The worker becomes an observer of their own obsolescence.

    I see this too in baseball. When the robotic umpire era dawns, we’ll get flawless strike zones and fewer bad calls. But we’ll also lose Earl Weaver kicking dirt, red-faced and screaming at the ump until his cap flew. That fury—the human mess—is baseball’s soul. Perfection may be efficient, but it’s sterile.

    Even my seventy-five-year-old piano tuner feels it. His trade is vanishing. Digital keyboards never go out of tune; they just go out of style. Try telling a lifelong pianist to find transcendence on a plastic keyboard. The tactile romance of the grand piano, the aching resonance of a single struck note—that’s not progress you can simulate.

    I hear the same story in sound. I often tune my Tecsun PL-990 radio to KJAZZ, a station where a real human DJ spins records in real time. I’ve got Spotify, of course, but its playlists feel like wallpaper for the dead. Spotify never surprises me, never speaks between songs. It’s all flow, no friction—and my brain goes numb. KJAZZ keeps me alert because a person, not a program, is behind it.

    The same tension threads through my writing life. I’ve been writing and weight-lifting daily since my teens. Both disciplines demand sweat, repetition, and pain tolerance. Neglect one, and the other suffers. But since I began using AI to edit two years ago, the relationship has become complicated. Some days, AI feels like a creative partner—it pushes me toward stylistic risks, surprise turns of phrase, and new tonal palettes. Other days, it feels like a crutch. I toss half-baked paragraphs into the machine and tell myself, “ChatGPT will fix it.” That’s not writing; that’s delegation disguised as art.

    When I hit that lazy stretch, I know it’s time to step away—take a nap, watch Netflix, play piano—anything but write. Because once the machine starts thinking for me, I can feel my brain fog over.

    And yet, I confess to living a double life. There’s my AI-edited self, the gleaming, chiseled version of me—the writer on literary steroids. Then there’s my secret writer: the primitive, unassisted one who writes in a private notebook, in the flickering light of what feels like a mythic waterfall. No algorithms, no polish—just me and the unfiltered soul that remembers how to speak without prompts. This secret life is my tether to the human side of creation. It gives my writing texture, contradiction, blood. When I’m writing “in the raw,” I almost feel sneaky and subversive and whisper to myself: “ChatGPT must never know about this.” 

    Appiah is right: the genie isn’t going back in the bottle. Every advance carries its shadow. According to Sturgeon’s Law, 90% of everything is crap, and AI will follow that rule religiously. Most users will become lazy, derivative, and hollow. But the remaining 10%—the thinkers, artists, scientists, doctors, and musicians who wield it with intelligence—will produce miracles. They’ll also suffer for it. Because every new tool reshapes the hand that wields it, and every gain carries a ghost of what it replaces.

    Technology changes us. We change it back. And somewhere in that endless feedback loop—between the bucket piano tuner, the dirt-kicking manager, and the writer lost between human and machine—something resembling the soul keeps flickering.

  • Thou Shalt Not Seek Meaning Where Only Rocks Dwell

    Thou Shalt Not Seek Meaning Where Only Rocks Dwell

    I was having dinner with my father—his post-divorce steak ritual on a patio that smelled faintly of smoke, charred meat, and newfound freedom. He’d bought a barbecue, a secondhand sofa, and the kind of wine that announces you’re single again but not destitute: red zinfandel in a tumbler. He cut into his steak with the swagger of a man who believed he’d successfully rerouted his son from the city dump to the university.

    “So,” he said, spearing a chunk of meat, “what are you thinking about majoring in?”

    My conversations with Master Po had me leaning toward philosophy and religion—the twin pillars of spiritual unemployment. “I think I’ll study philosophy or religion,” I said.

    He froze mid-chew. “Why in the hell would you want to do a thing like that?”

    “To study the search for meaning.”

    He swallowed, wiped his mouth, and took a long gulp of zinfandel. “Don’t waste your time.”

    “Meaning is a waste of time?”

    He smiled the way only a man twice-divorced and freshly cynical can smile. “Let me tell you a story.”

    He launched into a parable that sounded suspiciously homemade.

    A young man goes to the beach and asks God to reveal the meaning of life. God, ever the trickster, tells him the secret is written on one of the thousands of rocks scattered across the shore. The young man groans—it could take forever. God shrugs: “That’s not my problem.”

    So the man begins his search. Years pass. The tide rises and falls, civilizations collapse, and still he flips rocks like a man looking for lost keys in eternity’s junk drawer. When he’s old, leathery, and alone, he looks up at the sky and cries, “God, I’ve searched my whole life and found nothing! Every rock is blank. I’ve sacrificed joy, friendship, and everything good in the name of this search!”

    God looks down and says, “That’s right, you dumb shit. Now die.”

    When my father finished, he leaned back, self-satisfied, the smoke haloing his head like the ghost of a cigar.

    “Where did you hear that story?” I asked.

    He grinned. “I just made it up.”

    “Just now?”

    “Damn right. For your benefit.”

    “My benefit? What’s the moral?”

    “One, that God doesn’t give a shit. Two, that there is no meaning. And three, that you’d better not waste your college education searching for it.”

    Later that night, lying in bed, I consulted my spiritual mentor, Master Po, the philosopher of the leaky-roof dojo.

    “Master Po,” I said, “my father believes that searching for meaning is pointless.”

    “Your father is right, Grasshopper,” he said serenely. “The Way defies all grasping. Meaning is the mirage on the horizon—pursue it, and you will die of thirst. Better to drink from the river as it passes through your hands than try to hold it. For the river flows on… to the sea.”

    I thought about this while staring at the ceiling fan spinning in lazy circles. My father had God saying, “Now die.”
    Master Po preferred rivers and metaphors.
    Somewhere between them, I decided, was college.

  • Thou Shalt Not Confuse Self-Knowledge with Self-Flattery

    Thou Shalt Not Confuse Self-Knowledge with Self-Flattery

    When I was sixteen, my parents divorced—an event I took in stride only because I was too busy staring at my biceps in the mirror. My father moved into an apartment about thirty minutes away, and once a month he’d pick me up, grill a couple of ribeyes, and try to civilize me. It was his way of maintaining paternal authority through meat.

    One evening on his patio, with the smell of charcoal and masculinity wafting in the air, he asked me what I wanted to do with my life after high school. At the time, I was an aspiring bodybuilder with zero interest in college. I wanted a job that paid decently, had steady hours, and left me free to chase the holy trinity of youth: muscle, mirrors, and admiration.

    I told him I was thinking about becoming a sanitation engineer. A few guys at my gym drove garbage trucks and claimed it was honest work with great benefits.

    My father nearly choked on his steak.
    “You can’t be a garbage man,” he said, wiping his mouth with the precision of a surgeon preparing to deliver bad news.

    “Why not?”

    “Because you’re too vain.”

    That line hit like a barbell to the skull.
    “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked.

    He leaned back and launched into his Socratic cross-examination. “Picture this: You’re at a cocktail party. Everyone’s introducing themselves—doctor, lawyer, software engineer, business executive. Then they get to you. What do you say? ‘Hi, I’m Jeff, and I pick up your trash’? I should think not.”

    “Oh my God, Dad, you’re right.”

    “Of course I’m right,” he said, stabbing the last piece of steak like a punctuation mark. “I’m your father. Now finish your meat and start planning for college.”

    That night I turned to Master Po, my invisible philosopher-therapist, for guidance.

    “Master Po,” I asked, “why did my father insult me by calling me vain?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “your father did not insult you. He simply named your disease. Truthful words are not beautiful; they bruise. Flattering words are lovely but poisonous. Your father loves you enough to deliver the ugly truth—that you are a creature driven by vanity and status.”

    “But this means I have to go to college,” I said. “I’ve spent all my high school years pumping iron and admiring my reflection. I’m too dumb for college.”

    “Fear not, Grasshopper,” said Master Po. “The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

    “My steps are small,” I said.

    “That is fine,” said Master Po. “An ant on the move does more than a sleeping ox.”

    And so it was: my path to higher learning began not in inspiration but in insult—proof that sometimes enlightenment arrives medium-rare, served with a side of humility.

  • Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Maps, Not Megaphones: Lessons from Harari, Harris, and Kaplan

    Yuval Noah Harari opens 21 Lessons for the 21st Century with a line that feels more prophetic with each passing year: “In a world deluged by irrelevant information, clarity is power.”


    He’s right. Millions of people rush into the digital coliseum to debate humanity’s future, yet 99.9% of them are shouting through a fog of misinformation, moral panic, and algorithmic distortion. Their sense of the world—our world—is scrambled beyond use.

    Unfair? Of course. But as Harari reminds us, history doesn’t deal in fairness. He admits he can’t give us food, shelter, or comfort, but he can, as a historian, offer something rarer: clarity. A small light in the long night.

    That phrase—clarity in the darkness—hit me like a gut punch while listening to one of the most illuminating podcasts I’ve ever encountered: Sam Harris’s Making Sense, episode #440 (October 24, 2025), featuring author and geopolitical thinker Robert D. Kaplan. Their conversation, centered on Kaplan’s terse 200-page book Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis, offered something I hadn’t felt in years: coherence.

    Most days, I feel swept away by the torrent of half-truths and hot takes about the state of the planet. We seem to be living out Yeats’s grim prophecy that “the center cannot hold.” And yet, as Kaplan spoke, the chaos briefly organized itself into a pattern I could recognize.

    Kaplan’s global map is not comforting—but it’s lucid. He traces the roots of instability to climate change stripping water and fertile soil from sub-Saharan Africa, forcing waves of migration toward Europe. Those migrations, he argues, will ignite decades of right-wing populism across the continent—a slow, grinding backlash that may define the century.

    Equally destructive, he warns, is our collapse of media credibility. Print journalism—with its editors, fact-checkers, and professional skepticism—has been displaced by digital media, where “passion replaces analysis.” Emotion has become the currency of attention. Reason, outbid by rage, has left the building.

    Listening to Kaplan for a single hour taught me more about the architecture of global disorder than months of doomscrolling could. His vision is bleak, but it’s ordered. Sobering, but strangely liberating. In a time when everyone is shouting, he simply draws a map.

    And as Harari might say—maps, not megaphones, are what lead us out of the dark.

  • Confessions of a Nine-O’Clock Man

    Confessions of a Nine-O’Clock Man

    Forgive me, but I’m still trying to figure out where I fit in this digitized circus we call life. I’ll be sixty-four in a few days, and you’d think by now I’d have achieved some level of ontological clarity—but no. I’m still ensnared by the shimmer of online browsing, the algorithmic promise that I might finally become “somebody” by curating a virtual persona. Mostly, the internet feels like a tease: a hall of mirrors where everyone’s reflection looks happier, thinner, and better lit.

    I tell myself I want to contribute, to engage, to share some original thought. But then I open the news and wonder what I could possibly add to the churning doomscroll—what fresh moral insight could come from a man who still double-checks whether he unplugged the toaster?

    It would be laughable for me to preach self-control. I can barely keep my own appetites in check. Apart from my morning kettlebell rituals—five days a week of grunting and penance—I’m an introverted “cozy boy.” I stay home, binge true crime docuseries on Netflix, and rotate my diver watches like a museum curator with OCD. I make my monkish meals: buckwheat groats, Japanese yams, steel-cut oats, tofu glazed in teriyaki and moral superiority. I am a herbivore surrounded by carnivores. My family mocks me gently while gnawing ribs.

    Sometimes, in a fit of ambition, I record a two-minute piano piece for my neglected YouTube channel. It receives twelve views, one of them mine, and a comment that reads, simply, “Lovely.” The algorithm yawns and moves on.

    I am obsessed with the rituals of minor luxury—fine organic whole-bean coffee that accompanies me in my morning writing jaunts, triple-milled soap redolent of rose and citrus, podcast playlists curated for insomniac philosophers. My life is the slow burn of scent and sound, a long intermission between existential crises.

    By nine o’clock, I’m done. My wife and daughters laugh as I shuffle off to bed, a middle-aged Sisyphus retiring his rock for the night. I read for twenty minutes, then fall asleep to the soothing drone of Andrew Sullivan or Sam Harris debating civilization’s decay. It’s my lullaby of reason and despair.

    Forgive me if this sounds paltry. I’m still trying to figure it all out—how to live, how to matter, how to grow up before the credits roll.

  • Thou Shalt Drive On–And Never Look Back at the Van

    Thou Shalt Drive On–And Never Look Back at the Van

    When I was in high school, I watched four of my friends lose their minds over a single missed opportunity—a sunburned Greek tragedy in cutoffs and tube socks. Their decline began on a blistering afternoon in 1979, somewhere along the Grapevine—the steep, snaking pass that connects Northern and Southern California, or, in their case, paradise and perdition.

    The boys were headed south from the Bay Area to see the Dodgers in the playoffs, crammed in a sun-faded Chevy with the naïve optimism only teenage men possess. As they crested the Grapevine, they saw it: an orange, rust-flaked Volkswagen van steaming on the shoulder like a dying dragon. Around it stood four women—tanned, sweat-slick, and shimmering with mischief—Grateful Dead followers on their pilgrimage from chaos to Santa Barbara.

    The women waved tie-dye bikini tops like tribal flags and laughed with the wild, lawless energy of people who had never read a syllabus. My friends, being equal parts chivalrous and hormonally desperate, pulled over to help. They poured water into the boiling radiator, wiped their hands on their jeans, and were rewarded with radiant gratitude.

    “Come to the Summer Solstice Festival in Santa Barbara,” one of the Deadheads said, her voice a siren’s hum. “We’ll dance all night.”

    But my friends were men of purpose—or so they claimed. They had Dodgers tickets. Commitments. Civic duty. They politely declined, waved farewell, and continued toward Los Angeles, confident they’d made the adult decision.

    By the time they returned north, they were inconsolable.

    For the rest of high school, they fought bitterly over who had ruined their collective destiny. One blamed the driver for not turning around. Another accused the navigator of cowardice. They’d get drunk and rant about the “Lost Women of the Grapevine,” pounding tables and recounting their tragedy like war veterans mourning the platoon they never joined.

    One night, two of them came to blows at a house party, fists flying over the ghosts of imaginary Deadheads. I stepped in to break it up, only to catch a stray right hook to the temple.

    That night, nursing my swelling head with a washcloth, I turned to Master Po for enlightenment.

    “Master,” I asked, “how can one brief encounter with beautiful women destroy the minds of four men?”

    “Ah,” he said, “let this be your lesson, Grasshopper. The past is a seductive liar. When you cling to it, you feed it power it does not deserve. You transform an ordinary disappointment into a mythological Eden from which you’ve been exiled. And soon, you worship the loss itself.”

    He stroked his beard and added, “Living in the past is the mother of depression. Living in the future is the mother of anxiety. Living in the present, Grasshopper, is the mother of peace.”

    “But Master,” I said, “what if the past is more exciting than the present? And what if I enjoy being miserable?”

    “That is two questions,” he said.

    “Sorry, Master.”

    He nodded. “The past only seems exciting because you edit it like a movie trailer. You cut out the boredom, the sweat, the traffic, and the bad sandwiches. What remains is illusion—a highlight reel of what never truly was.”

    I pressed on. “But why do I sometimes poke at my pain—like pressing a sore tooth—just to feel alive?”

    “You are impoverished,” said Po.

    “I feel empty.”

    “Then you are filled,” he replied. “The Way does not strive, yet it overcomes. You are striving too hard, Grasshopper. Let go of the Grapevine.”

    I tried, but some part of me still saw my four friends stranded forever on that California pass, staring down the road where the van once shimmered in the heat—a mirage of desire that would haunt them long after their teenage tan lines had faded.