Cinemorphosis

Category: philosophy

  • Thanksgiving Heart Attack

    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.

  • The Afterlife My Grandmother Didn’t Need

    The Afterlife My Grandmother Didn’t Need

    When I was eight, my grandmother Mildred told me she didn’t believe in an afterlife. We were watching television in the guest room of my parents’ San Jose house when the topic of God drifted into the conversation. She said, with a calm that bordered on sorrow, “I don’t believe in heaven or hell. This is the only life we have.” There was no sermon in her tone, no attempt to recruit me into her worldview. She simply believed that convictions worth having have to be arrived at, not imposed.

    Her disbelief never softened her sense of right and wrong. She carried a moral gravity that had nothing to do with celestial rewards or punishments. She spent three decades as a social worker in Long Beach and, before that, taught in the public schools of San Pedro. Her family had fled the pogroms in Poland in the early twentieth century; she grew up in Los Angeles with the hardened clarity that comes from survival. Mildred proved, without ever saying so, that you don’t need the promise of heaven or the fear of hell to live a principled life.

    I never became as mature spiritually as my beloved grandmother. I am someone who struggles with temptation on a daily basis and need to imagine being judged for my misdeeds as an incentive to clean up my act. I think about my grandmother’s strong moral health and wonder if morality is something you’re born with. You can learn this and that lesson but the core of morality is something you either have or you don’t.

  • The Age of Kayfabe Outrage

    The Age of Kayfabe Outrage

    Writers like Robert Kaplan and Jaron Lanier have observed that society has traded analysis for outrage, swapping measured thought for emotional spectacle. I left Twitter—sorry, X—years ago to escape that hurricane of indignation, only to find the same moral theater thriving on Threads. Outrage, it turns out, is social media’s cash crop.

    This made me think of the Old and New Testaments, where prophets, Paul, and even Jesus in the temple showed no shortage of righteous fury. But their outrage was different—it was rooted in moral clarity and the courage to confront hypocrisy, not in the dopamine mechanics of public performance.

    Today’s outrage is a knockoff. It mimics the moral fire of the prophets but burns with cheaper fuel: vanity, self-branding, and the need to belong to a digital mob. It’s not the world of moral outrage we inhabit—it’s the world of fake outrage, a kind of performative fury that convinces even its actors of its authenticity. Like professional wrestlers in Vince McMahon’s ring, we’ve forgotten how to remove the mask.

    This is kayfabe morality: outrage as entertainment, conviction as cosplay. And unlike the prophetic anger of George Carlin or Isiah, which illuminated hypocrisy, ours merely monetizes it.

  • When Buying a New Computer Results in an Existential Crisis

    When Buying a New Computer Results in an Existential Crisis

    A computer is never just a computer. It’s a mirror of who you think you are — your ambitions, your identity, your delusions of purpose. If you fancy yourself a “power user” or “content creator,” you don’t want a flimsy piece of plastic gasping for air. You want a machine that hums with confidence — a gleaming altar to your productivity fantasies. You crave speed, efficiency, thermal dominance, at least 500 nits of blinding radiance, and a QHD or OLED screen that flatters your sense of destiny. The machine must look sleek and purposeful, the way a surgeon’s scalpel looks purposeful, even if it’s mostly used to slice digital cheesecake.

    That’s the mythology of computing. Now let’s talk about me. I’m 64, a man whose “power user” moments consist of reading an online article on one screen while taking notes on the other — a thrilling simulation of intellectual heroism. In these moments, I feel like an epidemiologist drafting a breakthrough paper on respiratory viruses, when in truth I’m analyzing a 900-word essay about AI in education or the psychological toll of protein shakes. I could do this work on a Chromebook, but that would insult my inner Corvette driver — the middle-aged man who insists on 400 horsepower for a trip to the grocery store, just to know it’s there.

    My setup hasn’t changed in seven years: an Acer Predator Triton 500 with an RTX 2080 (a $3,200 review model, not my dime), an Asus 4K monitor, and a mechanical keyboard that clicks like an old newsroom. The system runs flawlessly. Which is precisely the problem. Not needing a new computer makes me feel irrelevant — like a man whose life has plateaued. Buying one, however, rekindles the illusion that I’m still scaling great heights, performing tasks of vast cosmic significance rather than grading freshman essays about screen addiction.

    So yes, I’ll probably buy a Mac Mini M4 Pro with 48 GB of RAM and 1 TB of storage. Overkill, absolutely. “Future-proofing”? A sales pitch for gullible tech romantics. But after seven years with the Acer, I’ll have earned my delusion. The real problem is not specs — it’s time. By the time I buy a new computer, I’ll be 66, retired, and sitting before a computer whose lifespan will exceed my own. That realization turns every new purchase into an existential audit.

    I used to buy things to feel powerful; now I buy them to feel temporary. A computer, a car, a box of razors — all built to outlive their owner. The marketing says upgrade your life; the subtext whispers your warranty expires first.

    Maybe that makes me a miserabilist — a man who can turn even consumer electronics into meditations on mortality. But at least I’ll have the fastest machine in the cemetery, writing The Memoirs of a Miserabilist in 4K clarity, with perfect thermal efficiency and 500 nits of existential dread.

  • Sam Harris Has Tea with a Christian Nationalist

    Sam Harris Has Tea with a Christian Nationalist

    Sam Harris has always been a curious kind of mystic—one who believes in meditation, not miracles; consciousness, not creeds. He seeks transcendence without theology, a spiritual depth unburdened by institutional clutter. Religion, he concedes, sometimes gestures toward the same inner world he explores, but it arrives dragging a freight train of dogma, myth, and moral detritus.

    That distaste for organized faith didn’t stop Harris from sitting down with one of its most unyielding champions: Doug Wilson, a self-described “Christian nationalist” pastor out of Moscow, Idaho. Wilson is the sort of man who makes the Bible sound less like scripture and more like federal law. He calls himself a scriptural absolutist, affirms the Apostles’ Creed word for word, believes the earth is 6,000 years old, defends the Old Testament’s death penalties for Sabbath violators, and dreams of a Reformed Presbyterian theocracy—America governed by divine fiat and fossilized certainty.

    When Wilson argued that moral relativism was America’s undoing, Harris did not interrupt. The pastor warned that tolerance would rot the nation from within—imagining a slippery slope from pluralism to polygamy, from open borders to moral anarchy. Harris listened quietly, allowing Wilson to build his own cathedral of logic brick by brittle brick.

    Throughout the conversation, Harris stayed composed, probing only occasionally—asking about the justice of eternal damnation, or how exactly divine law handles marriage beyond the traditional mold. His restraint was surgical. He wasn’t there to score points; he was there to let the argument reveal itself.

    At one point, Wilson lamented that secular institutions had failed us. Oddly, Harris seemed to nod—at least internally. They shared a disappointment in modernity’s moral anemia, though their prescriptions could not be more opposed. Harris seeks meaning through reason and mindfulness; Wilson seeks it through submission and authority.

    By the end, no one converted anyone. Harris didn’t embrace theocracy, and Wilson didn’t abandon it. But something subtler occurred: civility. Wilson, almost startled, thanked Harris for his respect and good manners—an acknowledgment that such conversations usually end in shouting.

    So what did Harris accomplish? He held a mirror to theocratic ambition without breaking it. By letting Wilson speak freely, he illuminated the growing movement that longs for a Christianized state—a homegrown version of moral authoritarianism dressed as righteousness. Harris didn’t win an argument; he revealed the landscape of the battlefield.

  • How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    How Not To Turn Into a Pillar of Salt in the Internet Age

    Anna Lembke’s Dopamine Nation didn’t teach me anything comforting. It confirmed what I already suspected: addiction isn’t a habit; it’s a ravenous creature with a bottomless stomach. The more you feed it, the louder it howls. It storm-raids your mental vaults, looting the energy you need for your work, your relationships, and your sense of self. And your family feels the theft—spiritually, emotionally, domestically. Addiction doesn’t just eat you; it nibbles at everyone near you.

    Even with self-awareness, even with a clear understanding of triggers and a sincere desire for freedom, you don’t get a clean fight. The casino is rigged. Modern dopamine doesn’t drip from a bottle or a needle—it streams through fiber-optic cable. Our phones and laptops, the same devices we use to create, to earn, and to connect, also serve as the slot machines we keep in our pockets. The house never closes, and the drinks are free.

    Lembke tells us to avoid triggers, but what do you do when your trigger is baked into your professional life, disguised as “productivity” and “connection”? Avoidance becomes theater. You can only tiptoe around the swamp for so long before some lonely hour arrives, and curiosity knocks like an old vice with freshly polished shoes. A hit of self-pity, a twitch of boredom, a flicker of FOMO—and suddenly you’re back in the feed trough, gulping pixels like syrup. The crash comes fast: shame, exhaustion, vows of purity. Then the next impulse, the next relapse, the same ancient ritual. Lot’s wife didn’t want to look back; she simply couldn’t resist. Neither can we, sometimes. Salt is surprisingly modern.

    So the task becomes stark: learn to live in this world without turning yourself into a monument of regret. Train your gaze forward. Build the strength to resist that backward glance. The modern life mission isn’t to slay the demon—he regenerates too easily. It’s to starve him, inch by inch, while protecting the scarce, bright energy that makes you human.

    Becoming a human being is a high-stakes game. Learning to live a life in which you don’t become a pillar of salt is one of life’s chief endeavors.

  • Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Failure Is the Bedrock of Writing

    Stephen Marche, veteran journalist and author, says the secret to becoming a writer isn’t inspiration or networking or the right MFA program. It’s endurance. Grim, stubborn, occasionally delusional endurance. His slim volume On Writing and Failure makes one argument with relentless clarity: if you want to write, prepare to suffer. Forget talk of “flourishing,” “mentorship,” and “encouragement.” Writing isn’t a wellness retreat. It’s a trench.

    Marche opens with the perennial questions writers whisper to each other after one rejection too many: Does this get easier? Do you grow thicker skin? The response he quotes from Philip Roth is a gut punch: “Your skin just grows thinner and thinner. In the end, they can hold you up to the light and see right through you.” In other words, the longer you write, the more naked you become. Vulnerability isn’t a side effect of the craft; it is the craft.

    Marche’s bleak comfort is that every writer feeds off failure. Success is accidental—a borrowed tuxedo, worn briefly. Failure is the body underneath. Even the authors smiling from dust jackets look like rescued hostages, blinking at daylight before returning to the bunker of their desks to keep going. They don’t do it because it’s glamorous. They do it because not writing would be worse.

    I understand the pathology. After decades of cranking out what I believed were novels, I finally admitted I couldn’t write one—not at the level I demanded, not at the level worth inflicting on readers. That revelation didn’t spare me failure; it merely revealed strata of it. There’s the failure of rejection, the failure of the work, and the quiet, private failure of recognizing your own limits. Perhaps I could’ve spared myself time and spared literary agents grief. But failure has its curriculum, and I attended every class.

    Marche’s book is a sober reminder that writing is less a triumphal march than a pilgrimage carried out on blistered feet. Failure isn’t a detour; it’s the terrain. Rock layers of it: topsoil doubt, subsoil rejection, shale humiliation, limestone stubbornness. Dig deeper and you hit coal—compressed ambition under impossible pressure, black and combustible.

    Failure isn’t fashionable grit or a TED Talk slogan. When executives brag about “learning from failure,” they’re dilettantes. Writers are the professionals of defeat. To be a poet today is to live like a post-apocalyptic monk, scribbling in candlelight, shadow thrown against the cave wall, not out of masochism but because there’s no other way to stay human. The world may not care, but the work insists.

  • 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.