Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • When Loving Watches Starts to Feel Like a Job

    When Loving Watches Starts to Feel Like a Job

    In her darkly hilarious comedy special Father, Atsuko Okatsuka shares the origin story of her career in punchlines. Her schizophrenic mother once “kidnapped” her in Japan and whisked her away to the United States without warning, severing her ties to her father in the process. The trauma was so disorienting, so profound, that Atsuko now mines laughter for survival. She tells us, with a comedian’s grin and a survivor’s twitch, that she performs to fill an infinite hole in her soul with the validation of strangers.

    That hole is not unique to her. It’s a universal pit—bottomless and demanding. Validation comes in many flavors. For some, it’s esteem and admiration. For others, it’s expertise, artistry, the warm glow of audience approval. For Atsuko, it’s laughter. For others, it’s the faint buzz of a “like” on a post about a wristwatch.

    Let us now consider the watch obsessive, a different breed of relevance-seeker, but a kindred spirit nonetheless. He isn’t doing five-minute sets at the Laugh Factory, but he is performing—on Instagram, on forums, on YouTube, in the comment sections of strangers’ macro shots. He presents his taste, his “knowledge,” his ever-shifting collection. But underneath the sapphire crystals and brushed titanium is the same primal whisper:
    Do I still matter?
     Do they still see me?

    Here’s the tragic twist: he may already have the perfect collection. It gives him joy. It’s balanced. It fits in a single watch box. By all logic, he should stop. Buying another watch would be like adding a fifth leg to a table—wobbly and unnecessary. But he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.

    Why? Because if he stops collecting, he stops posting. If he stops posting, he stops being seen. And in a world addicted to scrolling, disappearing feels like dying.

    Relevance is the new oxygen. And social media is a machine that runs on novelty, not legacy. The digital hive forgets fast. “Gangnam Style” is now a fossil. “Call Me Maybe” is background noise at the grocery store. To stay visible, you must be new. You must be shiny. You must offer dopamine.

    And what happens when the watch addict manages his demons, reaches peace, and stops feeding the machine?

    He becomes boring. He becomes silent. He becomes irrelevant.

    And the parasocial bonds he once had—those illusory friendships, those mutual obsessions—fade. The sense of exile is real. It doesn’t matter that the exile is self-imposed. The pain still lingers.

    That fear—that primordial fear of irrelevance, of being cast out from the tribe—can be so powerful it masquerades as passion. It convinces the watch obsessive to keep flipping, keep chasing, keep posting. Not out of love, but out of fear.

    In this crazed state, the obsessive has succumbed to Performative Collecting–the transformation of a private pleasure into a public act staged for recognition. Watches are curated less for personal resonance than for their ability to sustain audience attention. Silence is interpreted as failure.

    So the question becomes: Are we collectors? Or are we hostages? Do we love horology? Or are we simply terrified of vanishing?

  • The Howard Ratner School of Watch Collecting

    The Howard Ratner School of Watch Collecting

    Watch obsessives have more in common with Howard Ratner than we care to admit. Yes, that Howard Ratner—the unhinged gem pusher played with twitchy brilliance by Adam Sandler in the Safdie brothers’ cinematic panic attack, Uncut Gems. Ratner operates in the Diamond District behind bulletproof glass, drowning in sparkle and debt. We operate behind the bulletproof delusions of horological obsession, buried in brushed steel and moonphase complications.

    Like Ratner, we gamble—not at sportsbooks, but with FedEx tracking numbers. We tell ourselves, this is the one as we refresh the delivery status of the next “grail” watch. The package might as well be glowing, Pulp Fiction-style. And like Ratner chasing a cursed Ethiopian black opal mined from the bloodied crust of the Earth, we twist ourselves into financial and emotional pretzels to score that one special piece—the wrist-mounted miracle that will finally quiet the voices.

    Spoiler: it never does. Why? Because we are trapped in an Acquisitive Panic Loop–a self-perpetuating cycle of anxiety relieved only by purchase, followed immediately by renewed anxiety. Collections expand not by intention but by momentum, like debt rolling downhill.

    Like the crazed watch collector, Ratner is a man who thinks more is the cure. More bets. More jewels. More chaos. The watch obsessive runs the same play. We soothe our midlife despair not with therapy or silence, but with spring drives, meteorite dials, and limited edition bronze cases. Our collections don’t grow—they metastasize.

    Like Ratner, our problem isn’t the world. Our problem is internal. The call is coming from inside the skull. He can’t stop because he doesn’t want to stop. The thrill is the point. Every acquisition, every wrist shot, every gushing forum post—just another hit of synthetic joy to distract from the gnawing void. We call it a hobby. Let’s not kid ourselves. It’s dopamine addiction disguised as design appreciation.

    Uncut Gems is a cinematic espresso shot laced with panic. My wife and brother couldn’t sit through thirty minutes. Too stressful, they said. Too jittery. I’ve watched it three times.

    But of course I have. I’m a watch addict.

    I live in Ratner’s world. The caffeinated chaos? That’s not discomfort. That’s home.

  • Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the Wounded Male Ego

    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.

  • The Schwinn Airdyne and the Three Realms of Fitness

    The Schwinn Airdyne and the Three Realms of Fitness

    About fifteen years ago, the literary magazine Zyzzyva published one of my short stories, “Phittnut’s Progress.” It followed a workout addict who trained with the same manic devotion Martin Luther once applied to penance and self-flagellation. At the time, I thought I was being clever. In retrospect, I was being autobiographical.

    I’ve long understood exercise as a spiritual journey—less Peloton, more Dante. Every workout is a descent, an ascent, or, on rare days, a brief glimpse of paradise. I grasped this intuitively long before I had any formal exposure to theology.

    When I was about seven, I watched a 1960s TV show in which a man in a gorilla suit terrorized castaways on a nameless island. The production values were laughable; the fear was not. That night, the gorilla followed me to my room. I lay in bed convinced the beast was beneath my mattress, growling, reaching upward, eager to drag me into its lair.

    Sleep was impossible until I deployed my first metaphysical escape hatch. I imagined myself drifting on a raft along a calm river, safely beyond the monster’s reach. Above me stood a benevolent woman—a hybrid of the Statue of Liberty and Dante’s Beatrice—watching over my passage. Ahead was a luminous haze, the same gauzy heaven Fred Gwynne’s Patience the Guardian Angel inhabits in the 1969 film The Littlest Angel. Only then did peace return.

    This architecture still governs my workouts.

    When I’m out of shape, I’m back in the Monster’s Lair. When conditioning improves, I find myself floating along Beatrice’s River. And when I hit my goal—when effort dissolves into rhythm—I enter the Glory of Patience.

    My Schwinn Airdyne is the portal between these realms.

    Six months ago, my ambition was modest: 600 calories in 54 minutes. Respectable. Enough to keep the gorilla at bay. As fitness returned, so did ambition. A month ago, I raised the standard. To remain outside the inferno, I now needed 700 calories in roughly 55 minutes.

    Then reality intervened.

    Four days ago, after brutalizing my body with an ill-advised plumbing project, I plunged straight into the pit. Two days later, I slogged for 56 minutes and scraped together a humiliating 500 calories. Full inferno. The simian breathed hotly.

    Today, I clawed my way back to 603 calories in 54 minutes. Not glorious. Not close to the 810 calories I burned in 61 minutes six days ago. But it’s movement in the right direction. The river is visible again. The monster’s reach falls short.

    For now, that’s enough.

  • The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading questions early and found myself with a full hour to kill. So I did what any quietly restless child with access to art paper would do: I drew a gigantic submarine.

    It was glorious. The hull bristled with portal windows, and inside each window lived a tiny, talkative world. Every occupant had something urgent to say. One man was making pancakes and inviting others over. A woman, her hair set in curlers, announced she was in no condition to be seen. Another guy sulked over a bowl of cereal because the box promised a free toy and delivered nothing. Someone tried to nap in a hammock but complained about the noise. A girl had a strip of apple skin lodged between her teeth and was losing her mind over it. There were at least a dozen such figures—boasting, whining, confessing, performing.

    It was a floating anthology of minor human grievances.

    I was proud of it. I felt like I was getting valuable training for my future career writing for Mad Magazine. I was quiet. I was finished with my work. I was bothering no one.

    Then Mrs. Eckhart appeared.

    She moved down the aisle between desks, paused, and studied my drawing. I waited for praise—some acknowledgment of creativity, wit, talent. Instead, I got disdain. Her red hair was stacked into a bouffant, her eyebrows arched in judgment.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

    “But I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was working quietly.”

    She ignored that and began reading my dialogue bubbles aloud, dripping sarcasm into every line. The class erupted in laughter—not the good kind, the kind that comes from watching someone get filleted by authority.

    Then she delivered the verdict.

    “Your parents should know how you’re spending your time in my classroom.”

    She flipped the page over and wrote a note explaining my offense. I was to take it home, secure parental signatures, and return it like evidence.

    That evening, after dinner, I showed my father the drawing.

    He was livid.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

    “I don’t know why,” I said. “I finished my work. I was quiet.”

    “It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

    “I don’t get it.”

    “By finishing early and doodling, you implied her work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

    “But I didn’t say anything. I just drew.”

    “It doesn’t matter if you’re right,” he said. “What matters is you made her angry. In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought those were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Go to your room. Write her an apology.”

    I wrote the apology. But even then, I knew—deep down—I had done nothing wrong. In fact, to this day, that submarine remains the best use of time I ever managed in her class.

    The truth was simple: Mrs. Eckhart didn’t like me. I was brooding, inward, melancholic. She sensed something in me she found intolerable. Once, after she criticized a homework assignment, I tried to explain myself.

    “You have an excuse for everything, don’t you?” she snapped.

    If all my teachers had felt that way, I might accept the diagnosis. But they didn’t. Every other teacher thought I was polite, attentive, fine. There was something specific between us that never resolved.

    Sometimes hostility is not psychological; it’s biblical. It has no cause, no logic, no cure.

    I think of the excellent movie The Banshees of Inisherin. Colm abruptly ends his friendship with Padraic. No grievance. No inciting incident. “I just don’t like you anymore.” That’s it. Padraic hasn’t changed. Colm simply finds him unbearable.

    After nearly forty years of teaching, I know this pattern well. I’ve been popular, well-liked, even beloved by students—but that hasn’t spared me the occasional student who radiated pure contempt. Once, friendly students asked if I noticed a guy in the back who glowered at me all semester. I told them yes. Every so often, someone decides you are intolerable. There is no appeal process.

    In those cases, effort only makes things worse. Trying to win favor intensifies the repulsion. The Chinese phrase captures it perfectly: mei ban fa—nothing can be done.

    Do I resent Mrs. Eckhart? A little. She was an authority figure with a visceral dislike for a ten-year-old boy. But what endures most isn’t bitterness. It’s joy.

    That submarine was alive. It was funny. It was mine. No note home, no scolding, no pinch-faced teacher can take that away.

  • The Potato Diet and the Gospel According to Mel Brooks

    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.

  • How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

    How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

    I was in sixth grade when I made the worst procrastination decision of my young life: I watched Night of the Living Dead instead of doing the dishes.

    I didn’t even want to watch it. My parents were out for the evening and issued a single, modest commandment: Do whatever you want—just do the dishes. The sink was stacked with plates, bowls, pots, and pans, a greasy jungle daring me to enter. I took one look and decided I deserved a short rest before battle. I collapsed into a yellow bean bag chair, turned on the TV, and landed on Creature Features, which was broadcasting one of the most psychologically devastating films ever made.

    I’d heard about the movie at school. Kids spoke of it in hushed, reverent tones, as if surviving it were a rite of passage. Fear, apparently, was proof of greatness. How bad could it really be? I told myself this while enjoying the immediate relief of not scrubbing forks. Then the movie started: a brother and sister visiting a grave. The atmosphere curdled instantly. Something was wrong. I should have changed the channel. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Fear and curiosity locked arms and dragged me forward.

    Minutes turned into hours. I watched bodies fall apart, social order dissolve, and hope get eaten alive. The gore wasn’t just gross—it was existential. By the time the credits rolled, something essential in me had been misplaced. Innocence, for starters.

    It was nearly midnight. My parents still weren’t home. I wandered into the kitchen and stared at the sink, now radiating menace of a different kind. I was in no psychological condition to clean anything. Zombies had ruined that option. I retreated to my room, crawled into bed, and slept with the covers pulled over my head like a man hiding from the apocalypse.

    Morning arrived with consequences. My parents were furious. The dishes remained undone. I tried to explain that I had endured profound trauma at the hands of George A. Romero, but this defense carried no legal weight. I had failed on all fronts: my psyche was scarred, my parents were enraged, and the dishes were still filthy.

    That night taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Procrastination lies. It promises comfort and ease but delivers a punishment far worse than the task you avoided. I could have spent thirty dull minutes cleaning plates. Instead, I spent the night traumatized by the collapse of civilization and woke up grounded. Avoiding the dishes cost me about a hundred times more than doing them ever would have.

  • Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    “Always be closing,” Alec Baldwin snarls in Glengarry Glen Ross, playing Blake, a blustering emissary of pure cortisol sent to terrify a roomful of salesmen into obedience. Closing, he tells them, is the only thing that matters. Not effort. Not integrity. Not sanity. Close or die. The line is famous because it taps into something already rotting inside us. We don’t just want to close deals; we want to close life. Getting married is a close. Deciding on a religion is a close. Graduating college is a close. Buying a house, buying a car, settling on a diet, hitting a goal weight—each one dangles the same promise: after this, I can rest. After this, I’ll be done.

    The culture worships closers. Closers are decisive. Closers have plans. Closers stride forward with laminated confidence. Closers collect ceremonies, milestones, certificates, and Instagram captions. Closing is marketed as maturity itself—the moment when uncertainty is evicted and order takes possession of the premises. Winners close. Losers waffle. That’s the myth.

    But closing is a con, and a lazy one at that. It sells the toddler fantasy of permanent comfort: arrive somewhere and stay arrived. Life, unfortunately, does not honor this contract. It leaks, mutates, backslides, and doubles back. I once knew a couple who were desperate to permanently break up with each other. So they got married as a strategy for divorce. They believed the divorce would provide closure—clean lines, sealed chapters, emotional foreclosure. Instead, they remarried. Then divorced again. Then they remarried. Then got another divorce. Closure didn’t show up. It never does. The story simply kept going, indifferent to their paperwork.

    The same lie infects consumer life. I know a man who believed salvation came in the shape of a Rolex Explorer. Ten thousand dollars later, he congratulated himself on having found his Exit Watch—the final piece, the closing bell. Within months, he was browsing watches that made the Rolex look like an appetizer. The watch didn’t close anything. It became a monument to the futility of the attempt.

    We love the idea of closing because we are exhausted—by the volatility of the world and the chaos inside our own skulls. “Always be closing” offers a fantasy of stillness, a promise that motion can end and anxiety can be put in storage. But it’s just another pressure pitch, no more real than the sales patter Mamet skewered. Life doesn’t close. It revises, reopens, and keeps charging interest. The only thing that truly closes is the sales pitch itself.

  • How 2025 Made Me Believe in Movies Again

    How 2025 Made Me Believe in Movies Again

    I lost my love for movies sometime in the last decade, when Hollywood began to feel less like a dream factory and more like an actuarial office with better lighting. Everything started to look like a boardroom decision in costume. I can count on one hand the films I bothered to see in theaters over fifteen years: Avatar, World War Z, Black Panther, Get Out. A few streamed titles shook me awake—Uncut Gems and Good Time from the Safdies, Paul Giamatti’s bruised soul in Private Life and The Holdovers, Paul Thomas Anderson’s sunburned nostalgia in Licorice Pizza, Ryan Coogler’s Sinners. But 2025 hit differently. Four films—Eddington, One Battle After Another, Bugonia, and Weapons—did something rare: they stared directly into the national nervous breakdown. These weren’t escapist fantasies. They were dispatches from a culture unraveling—where institutions inspire no faith, conspiracies feel more plausible than facts, politics has become cosplay, and we live in sealed-off realities that collide without ever conversing.

    Eddington blindsided me. Joaquin Phoenix plays a bitter, alienated, anti-mask sheriff in a New Mexico town during the pandemic, and he’s so fully possessed by the role that I didn’t recognize him for several minutes. I went in braced to hate the film—expecting a grim slog through our worst collective memories. Instead, I got something braver: a devastating portrait of a society that has slipped its moorings and drifted into a lonely fever swamp. The film doesn’t mug for satire or cheap laughs. It trusts the material. Every scene tightens the vise on your attention. It’s the kind of movie nine hundred ninety-nine directors would have drowned in. Ari Aster somehow swims.

    One Battle After Another turns political polarization into tragic pageantry. Sean Penn’s Colonel Lockjaw—a grotesque ICE-agent archetype—faces off against Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rocket Man, who might as well be an Antifa folk demon. But the movie’s real target isn’t left or right; it’s the theater of identity itself. We’ve become a nation of people in costumes, fighting playground wars with adult consequences. Once your political tribe becomes your personality, nuance feels like betrayal. The film suggests a hard truth: a country run by permanent adolescents doesn’t collapse in flames—it collapses in tantrums. Penn has built a career on operatic excess, but Lockjaw may be his most disturbingly perfect creation yet.

    Bugonia is stranger still. Jesse Plemons—leaner, sharper, and channeling a high-IQ Dale Gribble—plays Teddy, a man-child whose conspiracy obsessions keep him tuned to late-night AM radio and convinced that a tech CEO, played by Emma Stone, is an alien in need of kidnapping and repatriation. Once tied up in his house, she attempts to weaponize corporate confidence as an escape strategy, and her faith in managerial language becomes its own punchline. Plemons is reliably excellent, but Emma Stone has crossed into something rarer: the kind of presence Daniel Day-Lewis had in the nineties, where the screen bends around her. The film’s bizarre logic and eerie beauty sent me straight into the arms of Yorgos Lanthimos’ odd, seductive universe.

    Weapons brings the nightmare home—literally. Set in the suburbs, it tells the story of a witch who makes a classroom of children vanish. The teacher is blamed. The principal responds with bureaucratic platitudes. The town spirals. Beneath the horror scaffolding is a sharp allegory about addiction and institutional cowardice: when a society loses its ability to think clearly, every crisis metastasizes. The adults talk in slogans. The children disappear.

    Taken together, these films diagnose the same disease. Chaos becomes pandemonium when a culture retreats into fantasy and calls it identity. We dress up our impulses as ideologies. We curate personas instead of building character. The center doesn’t hold—not because of some invading barbarian, but because we’ve all invited the barbarian inside and handed him the keys. The good news, if there is any, is that there are still filmmakers brave enough to tell the truth about the mess we’re in. In 2025, cinema finally stopped trying to soothe me—and started telling me what I already knew but didn’t want to admit.

  • Are We Extras in Someone Else’s Luxury Watch Fantasy?

    Are We Extras in Someone Else’s Luxury Watch Fantasy?

    Six weeks with my fifteen-year-old twins is a better sociology course than anything you’ll find at UCLA. Their generation runs on shared experiences—amusement parks, concerts, parties—and the sacred ritual of turning those moments into cinematic TikToks. They love empathy. They love energy drinks. They love boba with the devotion earlier civilizations reserved for gods. They exchange hugs so theatrical they deserve SAG cards. They also love not driving. Why would they? They have concierge parents for that. The car is not transportation; it’s a mobile confessional booth where they talk, text, and disappear into playlists like monks retreating into sonic monasteries. Licenses can wait. I’ll be stunned if either one pilots a vehicle solo before age twenty-five.

    They dress alike, too—hoodies, high-rise jeans, baggy sweatpants. When I pick them up from school, I scan a sea of identical silhouettes and play a grim game of Where’s Waldo: Daughter Edition. It’s like they all emerged from the same fashion assembly line, stamped and released in bulk.

    Then there’s the strangest quirk of all: the generational terror of bare feet. We live in Southern California, where flip-flops are a constitutional right. But when my daughters’ friends come over, I’m ordered—ordered—to put on shoes. Feet are not feet anymore. They’re “dogs,” “grippers,” “claws,” a traveling carnival of anatomical horror. One girl saw my bare feet and reported back like she’d witnessed a crime scene. Since then, I suit up like a hazmat worker whenever teenagers enter the house.

    Watching their collective likes and dislikes has turned me into an amateur René Girard scholar. Girard argued that we don’t want things because they’re intrinsically wonderful; we want them because the tribe wants them first. Desire is social plagiarism. The tribe writes the script, and we perform it thinking it’s improvisation.

    But there’s a dark twin to mimetic desire: mimetic aversion. If the tribe hates something, we learn to hate it, too—even if we never felt a flicker of disgust on our own. Case in point: “I saw your dad’s dogs. Gross.” A moral judgment delivered about toes.

    Naturally, this has sent my twenty-year watch obsession into a philosophical tailspin. When we crave a watch, is it a private passion—or just tribal ventriloquism? Are we collectors, or are we obedient extras in someone else’s luxury fantasy? And if we’re that easily programmed, doesn’t it expose something mildly humiliating about us—our insecurities, our hunger to belong, our weakness for social approval dressed up as taste?

    Maybe understanding desire would clarify us. Or maybe it would only prove how unclassifiable we really are. Some mysteries resist labels.

    Still, in the watch world, mimetic aversion is practically doctrine. Quartz watches are treated like dietary betrayal. You used to grill rib-eyes and now you’re flipping soy burgers? Next you’ll be wearing Crocs and asking for decaf. Show up at the wrong meet-up with a quartz on your wrist and you won’t just lose respect—you’ll lose invitations, subscribers, and possibly citizenship. “Quartz?” they’ll whisper. “Traitor.”

    On the flip side, mimetic desire runs the show just as ruthlessly. Look at the waiting lists. Look at the resale prices. When you buy certain watches, you’re not buying steel—you’re buying absolution. A Rolex Sub isn’t a timepiece; it’s a baptism. The tribe anoints you with holy water and hums a choral anthem over your wrist.

    So yes, the watch hobby is soaked in mimetic desire and mimetic aversion. But here’s my heresy: if you’re a true watch obsessive, those forces barely apply to you. Because your relationship with watches isn’t tribal. It’s theological.

    A real watch obsessive is ruled by three forces.

    First, the Svengali Effect. A certain watch doesn’t attract you—it hypnotizes you. It hijacks your agency like a charming cult leader. You try to resist. You fail. The watch plants itself in your brain and grows there like an invasive eucalyptus until surrender feels like destiny. This isn’t imitation. This is possession.

    Second, Horological Fixation. At this stage, your watch stops being a timekeeping device and becomes a visual narcotic. You no longer use your watch to check the time—you commune with the object. The world fades. The wrist becomes a shrine. Eden relocates to forty-two millimeters of brushed steel.

    Third, Horological Transfiguration. You put on the watch and—boom—you’re not just dressed, you’re transformed. James Bond. Jacques Cousteau. Brad Pitt walking into a bar where the jukebox automatically switches to something heroic. The watch doesn’t accessorize you; it authorizes you.

    I’ve known watch obsessives for decades. I know the symptoms. I know the tells.

    So if you live under the Svengali Effect, Horological Fixation, and Horological Transfiguration, René Girard’s mimetic theory doesn’t really apply. The good news: you’re not a phony lemming chasing tribal approval. The bad news: you’re completely unhinged.

    Congratulations. You’re a true watch obsessive—authentic, independent, gloriously insane.

    Now put on your watch. You’ve been Clark Kent long enough. It’s time to rip open the shirt and let the cape fly.