Cinemorphosis

Category: philosophy

  • A Letter from S. Kierkegaard to Gilbert O’Sullivan, Upon Hearing “Alone Again (Naturally)”

    A Letter from S. Kierkegaard to Gilbert O’Sullivan, Upon Hearing “Alone Again (Naturally)”


    Copenhagen, the hour of melancholy

    Dear Mr. O’Sullivan,

    Permit me, in the solitude of this northern study, to offer you my condolences and my thanks.

    I have just listened to your song “Alone Again (Naturally),” and I must confess—I wept. Not the theatrical weeping of sentimental theatergoers or lovers of tear-stained novels, but the quiet, resigned weeping of the man who recognizes in another’s lament the echo of his own despair. You have sung, sir, what I have tried to write: the terrifying banality of abandonment, the nausea of meaninglessness, the shrill laughter of life’s cruel ironies dressed in soft melodies.

    What impresses me most is not your grief, but your refusal to disguise it. You do not rage at God with grand Nietzschean thunder. You simply say, “I expected better.” And there—there—is the true terror: not in the presence of pain, but in the unbearable silence of the heavens when one has cried out for mercy and received weather. You have given voice to the man I once called the Knight of Infinite Resignation—he who walks among others, smiling out of decorum, while his soul is collapsing inward like a dying star.

    Continue, if you can, to sing these dread lullabies. The crowd will mistake them for easy listening. But those of us who have stood at the edge of the abyss will recognize the truth behind your gentle chords. We are not soothed. We are seen.

    Yours in melancholic solidarity,
    Søren Kierkegaard
    (Author of Either/Or, The Concept of Dread, and other unpopular bangers)

  • If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    If Paul Feuded with His Rival Apostles on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen

    Title: The Real Apostles of Jerusalem: Pentecost and Pettiness on Bravo

    [INT. Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen – The studio is lit like a Roman bathhouse crossed with a New York tiki bar. Andy Cohen sits gleaming between a grimacing Paul the Apostle, in an impeccably tailored robe with Roman stitching, and Peter, who looks like he’d rather be crucified upside-down again than share a couch with Paul. To the left, Bartholomew checks his cuticles while James the Lesser sips merlot like it’s judgment day.]

    ANDY COHEN
    Welcome back to Watch What Happens Live! We are blessed tonight—literally. It’s an apostolic showdown, honey. On my left, we have Peter, James, John, and the boys from Galilee. And to my right, the man who insists he’s also a real apostle—Paul of Tarsus!

    PAUL (tight smile)
    I’m not just a real apostle, Andy. I’m the apostle to the Gentiles. I practically invented the church. And yet I’m never invited to the literary salons in Antioch, never quoted at theology brunches. I wrote thirteen letters—some of which people still read. Unlike certain fishermen whose only contribution was foot-in-mouth disease.

    PETER (fuming)
    Oh give me a break, Saul—I mean Paul. You show up years after the resurrection, claim you saw a “light,” and suddenly you’re the CEO of Jesus, Inc.? The rest of us actually knew the man. We walked with Him. We ate with Him. We heard Him snore. You had a seizure on a donkey and decided you’re the oracle of salvation.

    JAMES THE LESSER (leaning in)
    Let’s be real. If Paul had a PR team any better, he’d be trending on Messianic TikTok. The man has a scroll drop every month. “To the Galatians,” “To the Ephesians,” “To My Haters.” Please.

    ANDY COHEN
    Wow, okay! So Peter, what’s your biggest gripe with Paul?

    PETER
    He’s always subtweeting us in his epistles! “Even if an angel preaches a different gospel, let him be accursed.” Oh gee, I wonder who he meant. Then he throws in a “those who seemed to be something meant nothing to me.” That’s me, Andy! He means me! I was the rock! Now I’m a footnote?

    JOHN (muttering)
    I wrote a whole gospel and he still called me “pillar adjacent.”

    PAUL (exploding)
    You accuse me of ambition, but I suffered for this calling. I was shipwrecked! Imprisoned! Bitten by snakes! You lot had fish and loaves—I had near-death experiences and unpaid missionary tours! If I boast, I boast in the Lord. And maybe also a little in my rhetorical genius.

    BARTHOLOMEW (finally speaking)
    He called himself the least of the apostles and then made himself the brand.

    PAUL
    The Spirit speaks through me!

    PETER
    The Spirit told you to call me a hypocrite in front of the Galatians?

    PAUL
    If the sandal fits.

    ANDY COHEN (grinning like a man feeding Christians to lions)
    Oof! Okay, we are flaming tonight—like the bush, not the brunch. Final thoughts? Can we bury the hatchet like it’s buried at Golgotha?

    PETER (snatching his wine glass)
    Sure. I’ll bury it right here.

    Peter hurls the wine in Paul’s face. The studio erupts. Paul stands, soaked and fuming, quoting 2 Corinthians about his sufferings while John rolls his eyes and checks his scroll for quotes about loving one another.

    ANDY COHEN (gleeful)
    Okay, that’s the gospel according to Bravo! Next week: Mary Magdalene claps back at Judas in The Real Disciples: Women Tell All! Goodnight, everybody!

    [Cue the theme song: “Turn the Other Cheek (Remix)” by DJ Pontius Pilate.]

  • If Kierkegaard Wrote a TV Review of The Pitt

    If Kierkegaard Wrote a TV Review of The Pitt

    Title: The Sickness Unto Careerism: A Review of The Pitt
    By S. Kierkegaard (translated from the dread)

    In The Pitt, we behold not a hospital, but a crucible of despair masquerading as productivity. Here, men and women do not treat illness—they perform competence. Each character is driven not by love of medicine or patient, but by the terrible fear of being unremarkable. The show is not about healing bodies; it is about sustaining the fiction of self.

    What torments the staff of The Pitt is not death, but possibility—the gnawing anxiety that their lives could be otherwise, that beneath the pager beeps and sterile monologues lies the choking truth: they have chosen incorrectly. They grasp at promotions, publications, and approval from institutions as if these might quiet the inward scream of inauthenticity. They cannot be alone, for solitude would demand an encounter with the Self, and such an encounter would destroy them.

    Thus The Pitt is not drama; it is diagnosis. Each scene is a new symptom of the despair that arises when one pursues admiration instead of inwardness, prestige instead of passion. These doctors do not fear God. They fear irrelevance. And in this, they are modern to the marrow.

  • If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal Listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”

    If Blaise Pascal listened to 10cc’s “I’m Not in Love”—that haunting anthem of denial, repression, and the unbearable weight of vulnerability—he would recognize a soul attempting to cloak longing in irony, and failing beautifully. Pascal might scribble in his notebook, pen dipped in both skepticism and sorrow:

    1.
     Man denies love not because he is free from it, but because he is enslaved by it. The louder he insists he feels nothing, the more we hear the tremor of devotion in his voice. “I’m not in love” is merely a liturgy of protest against the heart’s verdict.

    2.
     He removes her picture—not to forget her, but to stop trembling at the sight of it. In doing so, he seeks mastery over his affections by performing indifference. But emotion, like God, does not vanish because man has ceased to name it.

    3.
     He insists: “It’s just a silly phase.” But only those who are drowning need to rename the water. The one who plays casual most often suffers the deepest cut, for pride clutches at dignity even as the soul dissolves in yearning.

    4.
     We would rather say, “I don’t care,” than risk the shame of caring too much. Man arms himself with detachment the way cowards wear armor—not to protect the heart, but to avoid ever using it.

    5.
     Every word he utters is a mask stitched by fear. He cannot love openly, for he believes vulnerability is weakness. And yet, in avoiding weakness, he becomes truly pathetic—a captive of what he dares not name.

    6.
     To say “don’t think you’ve won” is to reveal that one has already lost. The war is over. The heart surrendered in the second verse. Only the mind marches on, planting flags on a battlefield already buried in flowers.

    7.
     There is no cruelty greater than pretending not to feel. It is a lie told to oneself in the presence of truth. Love, when denied, becomes not less real—but more dangerous, like a flame hidden under dry cloth. It will burn eventually.

  • If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal Had Listened to “Deacon Blues”

    If Blaise Pascal had listened to “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan—a song about the seductive dignity of failure, self-invention, and the strange glory of obscurity—he might have jotted down a set of Pensées to dissect the Deacon Blues persona.

    1.
     Man prefers to be a broken genius than an obedient saint. The dream of ruin, if it is romantic enough, intoxicates him more than the dull clarity of success. He calls this rebellion, but it is merely another form of vanity—failure dressed in excessive self-regard.

    2.
     He who calls himself “Deacon Blues” chooses a name of ironic grandeur. He does not wish to be great, but to appear profound in his brokenness. This too is a form of ambition—narcissism inverted and dipped in bourbon.

    3.
     The world offers two false promises: the applause of others and the nobility of being misunderstood. Deacon Blues seeks the latter, not because it is better, but because it hurts less to fail on one’s own terms than to succeed on another’s.

    4.
     To live in the margins and call it freedom—this is man’s trick. He flees from the burden of excellence and cloaks his retreat in poetry. But exile, chosen for aesthetic reasons, is still a form of cowardice.

    5.
     He dreams of learning to work the saxophone, not to make music, but to be seen as one who has suffered for his art. In this, he is like those who wish to be martyrs, not for truth, but for drama.

    6.
     “Drink Scotch whisky all night long and die behind the wheel.” Thus he crowns his life not with virtue, but with stylized destruction. He does not want to be saved—only to be mourned beautifully.

    7.
     Deacon Blues wants a name, not a self. He believes identity is a lyric he can write into being. But names do not change the soul, only the soundtrack to its delusions.

  • The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    About ten years ago, I found myself standing on the sun-scorched lawn outside the campus library, chatting with a colleague who was edging into his sixties. I was freshly minted into my early fifties, just far enough along to start scanning the horizon for signs of irrelevance. Naturally, our conversation slid into that black hole topic older academics can’t resist: retirement—or, as my colleague eloquently rebranded it, “a form of extinction.” According to him, the day you stop teaching is the day your name starts sliding off the whiteboard of history. You don’t just stop working—you vanish. The world changes its locks, and your keycard stops scanning.

    From there, the conversation took its next logical step—death. And that’s when I said something that was equal parts earnest and glib:
    “Even at my lowest, most gut-punched moments, I’ve always had this strange, burning desire not only to live—but to never die.”
    Why? Because I am possessed by a compulsive need to know how it all turns out.

    On the grand scale:
    Was Martin Luther King Jr. right? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice—or is it more like a warped coat hanger, twisted in a fit of cosmic indifference?
    Will humanity eventually outgrow its primal stupidity and evolve into a species guided by reason?
    Or will we just become meat-bots—part flesh, part firmware—hunched under the cold glow of the Tech Lords who now sell us grief as a service?
    Will thinking, one day, come in capsule form—a sort of Philosophy 101 chewable tablet for those who can’t be bothered?

    But my curiosity isn’t all grandiloquent and philosophical. I want to know the dumb stuff, too.
    Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?
    What will dethrone the current Netflix darling?
    Who will succeed Salma Hayek as the reigning goddess of unattainable beauty?

    Like every other poor soul conscripted onto Planet Earth, I didn’t ask to be born. But now that I’m here, uninvited and overcommitted, I can’t help it—I want to see how this mess plays out.

    Still, I sometimes wonder: Am I just a naive late bloomer clinging to a plot twist that isn’t coming?
    Is there some ancient nihilist out there—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering aphorisms in a grim little café—who would look at me and sneer, “What’s the fuss, kid? It’s all the same. Same story, different soundtrack.”

    Maybe.
    But I think there’s a stubborn ember in me that keeps expecting irony to trump monotony, that believes the cynic’s spreadsheet of life’s futility has a few formula errors. Maybe my refusal to give up on surprise is what keeps my inner candle burning.

    And maybe, just maybe, that makes me an optimist in exile—still walking the fence between wonder and weary resignation, while the true cynics stand on the other side, arms crossed, whispering,
    “Don’t worry, you’ll be like us soon enough.”

  • I Am My Own Audiobook: A Washed-Up Reader’s Redemption Arc

    I Am My Own Audiobook: A Washed-Up Reader’s Redemption Arc

    After four decades of teaching college writing, I now find myself plagued by a humiliating truth: my reading habits have withered into something more decorative than devout. In my twenties, I devoured two books a week like a literary piranha. Now, I manage a limp 30-minute bedtime reading session before drooling onto the page like a narcoleptic bookworm. Call it aging, call it digital distraction, or—as I like to tell myself in moments of flattering delusion—call it undiagnosed ADHD. Whatever the cause, my reading stamina has become a cautionary tale.

    If I want to do anything resembling real, rigorous reading, I’ve learned to prop myself between two 27-inch screens like a cyborg monk: one monitor displaying the sacred text, the other open to Google Docs so I can take notes, argue with myself, and shame my inner skimmer into paying attention. This is not pleasure reading. This is performance reading—a controlled environment designed to bully my mind into staying in the room. If a book so much as looks at me funny, I’ll click over to email.

    But something strange has happened: I’ve become a better listener than reader. I now “read” through Audible with more duration and intensity than I’ve mustered with paper in years. Especially with nonfiction, the audiobook format feels less like cheating and more like a form of literary intravenous drip—direct, efficient, and oddly intimate. That’s why a recent blurb in The New Yorker caught my eye: Peter Szendy’s Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks isn’t just an academic tour through literary history—it’s a philosophical rebranding of the audiobook experience.

    Szendy resurrects a long-lost distinction between two roles: the reader (the person decoding text) and the readee (the listener, the audience of the reading). Since antiquity, he notes, most literature wasn’t read—it was heard. We were, for most of human history, listenees. Silent, solo reading is a relatively recent phenomenon, and yet we’ve somehow crowned it the gold standard of literary engagement. Szendy isn’t buying it. In fact, he argues for the emancipation of the readee—a manifesto that practically throws confetti over the return of orality via Audible.

    And here’s the kicker: even when we read to ourselves, we’re still listenees. We are listening to our own interior narration. We are, in essence, narrating to ourselves. Szendy suggests that when we read, we play both roles: the voice and the ear, the actor and the audience. And when we listen to a book, we are doing something ancient, dignified, and sacred—not some degraded, dumbed-down version of real reading.

    So yes, maybe I’m a fallen reader, a man who used to crush Dostoevsky before breakfast but now requires high-tech scaffolding just to get through a paragraph. But thanks to Szendy, I can now see myself as a kind of restored readee—part monk, part machine, part audiobook in human form. Not a failure of attention, but a return to tradition. And if my bedtime ritual now sounds more like a podcast than a prayer, well… Plato probably would’ve approved.

  • Nostalgia Is a Liar and a Thief

    Nostalgia Is a Liar and a Thief

    Romanticizing the past isn’t just foolish—it’s morally bankrupt. To coddle nostalgia is to buy into the comforting lie that things were once better, purer, simpler. They weren’t. That “beautiful past” you’re pining for? Fiction. A curated highlight reel edited by your dopamine-addled memory. In clinging to it, you’re not just turning your back on the present—you’re scorning the real, imperfect people around you in favor of ghostly caricatures from a fantasy world.

    Worse, nostalgia doesn’t just lie—it sedates. It lulls you into a syrupy, maudlin stupor where forward motion feels sacrilegious. Why build something new when your mind’s already rented a timeshare in 1983? The more you indulge it, the more you stall out—emotionally, spiritually, and socially.

    And let’s not ignore the narcissism at its core. Nostalgia gives self-pity a golden frame. You’re not grieving a lost time; you’re grieving the version of yourself you imagined you were back then. The tragedy? That person never existed. You’ve built an altar to an illusion—and now you’re feeding it your present.

    In the end, nostalgia doesn’t connect you to anything. It isolates you. It invents a wound and then forces you to mourn it. Regret follows, not because you lost something real, but because you’ve convinced yourself you did. It’s time to stop romanticizing the fog and start walking through it.

  • Why Ritualized Combat Still Needs a Line You Don’t Cross

    Why Ritualized Combat Still Needs a Line You Don’t Cross

    In The Professor in the Cage, Jonathan Gottschall argues that sports like football aren’t just games—they’re stylized duels, ritualized combat wrapped in pads and broadcast rights, and they function on one essential currency: honor. Strip away the cleats and helmets, and you’re left with the same ancient male impulse—to fight, to dominate, and to prove you’re not the rabbit in a room full of wolves.

    But here’s the twist Gottschall doesn’t miss: even in the most violent games, there are rules—rituals that separate man from animal, performance from savagery. The football field, the octagon, the prison yard, the nightclub—they’re all arenas of testosterone-laced theater where men assert dominance, but with an agreed-upon script. Break that script, and you don’t just commit a foul—you commit a cultural sin.

    Trash Talk, But Make It Sacred

    We tend to think of trash talk as disrespectful—and, sure, it often is. But it’s also part of the ritual. Mind games, verbal jabs, icy stares, even the headbutt-in-slow-motion during a coin toss—it’s all within the monkey dance. The key is: you stay within the choreography. There’s a line you don’t cross.

    Bill Romanowski didn’t just cross the line—he nuked it. In 1998, the white Denver Broncos linebacker spit on Black 49ers receiver J.J. Stokes. Not trash talk. Not gamesmanship. Spit. A loaded gesture, freighted with the filth of American racial history—slavery, Jim Crow, the days when white men spat on Black men to reduce them to less than human.

    Romanowski’s act wasn’t just disgusting. It was ritual desecration. So offensive, his own teammates were furious. Shannon Sharpe, on national television, looked ready to turn in his mic for a helmet and hunt Romo down himself. Tom Jackson—veteran linebacker, no stranger to violence—said it plain: “If a white man had spit on me, I’d have told him, ‘Do it again and I’ll kill you.’”

    That’s the level of violation we’re talking about. Because saliva isn’t just gross—it’s symbolic. In the world of ritualized combat, putting your spit on someone is not communication—it’s provocation. It’s the opening move in a fight, not a play.

    The Gum on the Ashtray: A Nightclub Parable

    Gottschall’s theory doesn’t just live on the field. I’ve seen it firsthand—in 1989, at a nightclub in Bakersfield. I was a new writing instructor, sitting with some Nigerian colleagues, when a crew of men—hardened, street-weathered, violent-looking—decided they didn’t like our presence. One of them walked over, pulled the gum from his mouth, smashed it into our ashtray with theatrical contempt, and walked off.

    Let me decode that for you: he spit on our table without actually spitting. He made a saliva-based gesture designed to start something. And the unspoken law was clear: respond, or leave and accept that you’ve been punked.

    I left. Because I wasn’t ready to fight five guys who looked like they’d fought their way out of worse places than any writing conference I’d ever attended.

    But the principle was unmistakable: once the ritual starts, you have to define yourself. Are you food, or are you the one eating?

    The Prison Equation: No Bananas, No Mercy

    Gottschall brings it full circle with prison—the pressure cooker of male hierarchy. There, the rules are stripped to the bone. If you don’t retaliate, you don’t just lose a banana—you lose your humanity. You become “the rabbit.” The food. The one they take from, laugh at, exploit.

    He writes, “If you fail the heart test, the other inmates will take your food, exploit your commissary privileges, extort your relatives, and make you a slave.” In other words: show weakness once, and you’re done.

    Football, Violence, and the Unspoken Law

    Now take that mindset to football. When a linebacker stares down a quarterback after a sack, or a cornerback jaw-jacks a wideout after a deflection, they’re not just showing off—they’re broadcasting: “I am not the rabbit. I am not food.”

    That’s why we watch. Beneath the helmets, we’re witnessing status battles in real time, under stadium lights. It’s ritualized war with a rulebook and highlight reels. And we love it. Because something ancient inside us recognizes the stakes, even if we don’t name them.

    But even here, in the modern Coliseum, the honor code must hold. Break it—spit on your opponent, stomp a head, ignore the script—and you’re not just a dirty player. You’re a violator of the sacred order. You’re chaos in a world that depends on containment.

    Conclusion: Spit Happens, But It Shouldn’t

    So yes, ritualized combat is part of our DNA. We can’t scrub it out any more than we can stop blinking. But it only works when the rules of engagement are followed. Trash talk is theater. Respect is the scaffolding. And spit—literal or symbolic—is a bridge too far.

    Because when men fight, they must fight with rules.
    And if they don’t?
    It’s not sport anymore.
    It’s just violence.

  • The Gorilla Pecs of Glory: Why We Watch Men Smash Each Other and Call It Civilization

    The Gorilla Pecs of Glory: Why We Watch Men Smash Each Other and Call It Civilization

    According to Jonathan Gottschall, author of The Professor in the Cage: Why Men Fight and Why We Like to Watch, football isn’t just sport—it’s ritualized combat. A tamed brawl. A socially sanctioned way to indulge our primal appetite for domination without devolving into street warfare. He calls it the monkey dance, a primitive ballet with rules, referees, and halftime shows. I prefer a less polite term: the gorilla pec slap—because that’s what it is. Chest-thumping, ego-flexing theater that feels a lot less like play and a lot more like primal pageantry.

    Gottschall’s thesis is blunt and unapologetic: we are wired for battle. From schoolyard scuffles to rap battles to cage fights, we seek structured conflict to test status, establish pecking orders, and avoid descending into outright anarchy. Whether it’s verbal warfare on stage or two linemen colliding at full speed, it’s all the same story: controlled aggression keeping the real chaos at bay.

    And the stakes, bizarrely, are moral. Gottschall suggests that these “battles with a code” serve a civilizing function: they allow men—yes, mostly men—to hash out dominance hierarchies without burning down the village. Ritualized violence, he argues, is less toxic than the alternative: unpredictable, unsanctioned brutality.

    This raises an uncomfortable truth about the function of sports: men need to know where they stand. The pecking order isn’t just some caveman relic—it’s a form of psychological infrastructure. Everyone knowing their “lane” may sound medieval, but Gottschall insists it’s what prevents society from devolving into a Mad Max sequel. And frankly, he might be right.

    Ritualized battle—be it on the field, the mat, or the mic—feeds something deeper than bloodlust. It gives us narrative. Stories of courage, humiliation, redemption, and collapse. We see ourselves in those stories. We crave them not just for the carnage but for what they reveal: who we are when the pressure spikes and the lights come on.

    Still, some social critics aren’t buying it. They see football and its violent cousins as nothing more than toxic masculinity wrapped in billion-dollar branding. To them, it’s hero cosplay for emotionally stunted men. But Gottschall flips that argument: suppressing these instincts doesn’t make us enlightened—it just makes us dishonest.

    That said, even if we accept that ritualized combat is hardwired and necessary, we’re still left with a lingering question: at what cost? The bodies pile up. The brains deteriorate. Athletes become avatars for our fantasies—and casualties of them, too. Their injuries are real, their careers often short, and their pain long. And yet the spectacle rolls on.

    Meanwhile, the sports industry—like any good dealer—knows how to keep us hooked. Betting apps ping our dopamine receptors, endless content fills our social feeds, and we’re suddenly refreshing stats at 2 a.m. like Wall Street analysts chasing fantasy league glory. What started as play becomes compulsion. Hero worship mutates into dependency. Sports betting morphs into moral rot.

    So where does that leave the thinking sports fan? Are we doomed to either overanalyze the game into oblivion or become wide-eyed addicts to its spectacle? Can we still enjoy a bone-rattling hit without silently calculating the CTE risk?

    There are no easy answers. But here’s the uncomfortable truth: sports are too good at what they do. They hijack our lizard brains, feed our tribal instincts, and offer us drama cleaner than politics, safer than war, and more thrilling than any sermon.

    And like those mythical gorillas slapping their chests in the mist, we’ll keep watching. Because beneath the helmets and highlight reels, we’re not just watching games—we’re watching ourselves. And that, more than anything, is the real addiction.