Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • Can Movies Save My Soul?

    Can Movies Save My Soul?

    I write as an agnostic, so this is not a sermon. It is a meditation on Philippians that leads to what I see as three major orientations toward life.

    I’ll begin with Paul’s Epistle to the Philippians. I’m fascinated by Philippians because it defines the Christian message in a way that goes against human instinct. Throughout history and across cultures, the human default setting has been to prefer power, convenience, comfort, and pleasure over a life committed to a higher cause. But in Philippians, God comes to Earth, denies himself glory and power, and instead lowers himself to love and serve others. His life becomes a model for us, one that demands imitation.

    If we study his life, we learn that life is not a plaything, a toy designed to provide pleasure and excitement. Contrary to much of modern psychology, with its emphasis on self-agency, autonomy, and self-individuation, life does not belong entirely to us. It contains a purpose greater than our instincts for pleasure, power, and self-actualization. Philippians teaches us that our purpose is to lower ourselves in order to love and serve others. Christianity at its best is a distillation of that message in all its potency.

    Talk is cheap, of course. Many have marveled and wept at the beautiful, albeit challenging, message in Philippians and preached about it, but few have actually lived it. The literature suggests that Saint Francis of Assisi lived such a life. A life of self-renunciation in imitation of Christ, embracing poverty over riches, is rare indeed.

    When I first contemplated this humble life, I framed existence as a choice between two orientations: self-renunciation in service to God or self-gratification in service to our baser instincts. But as I’ve watched and enjoyed Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan discussing movies and culture on the Netflix presentation of the podcast The Big Picture, I’ve come to recognize a third orientation, one that may help explain my agnosticism.

    These three podcasters, who strike me as secular, seem to genuinely love what they do. No doubt about it, they work hard, slogging through hundreds of mediocre movies a year and occasionally encountering a few good ones. They are extremely smart, talented, and passionate about their work. They don’t strike me as greedy people who worship at the altar of money or lead grotesquely hedonistic lives that would make Gollum blush with shame.

    They are cosmopolitan and educated. They believe in smart conversations, the pleasures of nuanced analysis, the wonder of good art, and the power of storytelling. They understand the vitality cinema brings to culture. A successful movie becomes a sort of muse. It informs society. It reflects society. It changes society. It shares a language with society. Fans of Wayne’s World or A Few Good Men frequently quote famous lines, evidence of the permanent stamp these movies have left on them.

    A great movie like Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey or Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything creates a text for endless discussion. Such movies transcend entertainment by disrupting culture, changing the way we see things, and illuminating aspects of the human condition we may never have considered.

    To see art, and movies specifically, as a place of transcendence suggests that art, not religion, may be the muscle humanity needs to flex to stay vibrant. This is not a dogmatic transcendence tied to one doctrine or another. Watching The Godfather won’t help you on Judgment Day. But it will make you interrogate the messy relationship between business and family loyalty in new ways.

    Great movies won’t give you a religious doctrine, but they can help you distinguish between sacred and profane time, as in Bill Forsyth’s Housekeeping. Movies don’t shut down conversations with absolute dogmas. They open new conversations that keep the mind alive. That’s what I see in the work of the talented Sean Fennessey, Amanda Dobbins, and Chris Ryan.

    I worry that a life of religious certainty, with its monk-like retreat into poverty and blissful prayer, may cut us off from art in all its contradictory, life-beating spectacle. I worry that religious doctrine can become stagnant and two-dimensional in a way that art remains dynamic and multidimensional.

    At the same time, when I contemplate the love described in Philippians, my heart longs for such a life. I wonder if such a life could save me and the lost, self-deceiving souls in Weapons, Eddington, and Bugonia.

  • One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    One Flew Over the Cozy Nest

    I was approaching sixty-five when the idea of something being cozy or not became the operating principle through which I viewed the world. The mildly entertaining, sentimental TV show Best Medicine was cozy because the small coastal fishing village of Port Wenn, Maine, was built on community connection and trust, qualities increasingly scarce in a country becoming paranoid, isolated, and unhinged by weaponized misinformation and cultural and political polarization.

    The LG TV interface I had to use was bonkers, with flashing lights and a runaway cursor that produced chaos rather than efficient navigation. Replacing this frustrating operating system with a Roku device would make the TV cozy. Having a lightning-fast Chromebook with premium hardware and guaranteed security updates was cozy, but its buggy replacement, the supposedly more premium Googlebook with half-baked software, was not cozy.

    Having nostalgic Folgers coffee in the morning was cozy. Shaving with my vintage Gillette razors, which evoked childhood memories of admiring my father during his morning shaves, was cozy. Using a bar of soap for all my shampoo and body wash needs instead of relying on liquid soap in plastic bottles was cozy. Wearing a solar Multiband-6 G-Shock Frogman, with its reliability and atomic accuracy, was cozy. Wearing a tank top emblazoned with Maui or Kona and gray nylon gym shorts, which served as my uniform for sleeping, working out, and running errands, was cozy. Watching true crime and animal documentaries, which sometimes lulled me into a blissful state of half-sleep, was cozy. Learning that the 2.0-liter turbo engine in my 2018 Honda Accord might be susceptible to a blown head gasket, contradicting Honda’s reputation for long-term reliability, was definitely not cozy.

    I had gone overboard with cozy. It had become an operating principle governing all my thoughts. This cozy craze exposed my obsessive personality, which was always searching for an absolute system that explained everything. I knew it was crazy, sometimes laughable, and often annoying, but I couldn’t stop it. Against my will, I had become a terminal patient in a movie titled One Flew Over the Cozy Nest.

    I had to do something. I had to cure myself of my cozy obsession before it was too late. I had to interrogate the flaws of the cozy quest. I began with the foremost principle for combating my pathological desire to cocoon myself in a warm, cozy state. I called it the Universal Law of Diminishing Comfort: The pursuit of comfort can become a source of discomfort. What begins as a sensible effort to eliminate unnecessary aggravation gradually becomes an obsession with eliminating uncertainty itself. In other words, the cure becomes worse than the disease.

    The astute Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard identified my folly long ago when he warned about the dangers of trying to secure ourselves against life’s uncertainties. We attempt to manage our lives to create an illusion of security while hollowing ourselves out from within. As the cozy lifestyle becomes more cultivated, the soul atrophies.

    Life is chaotic to the point of being terrifying. I turn on my LG TV, try to scroll to Netflix, and inexplicably the cursor exits the Home screen. Suddenly, I’m lost inside a hostile green screen that reads webOS. I need my Roku Ultra 4K so I can find my way back home.

  • The Man Who Would Be Watch

    The Man Who Would Be Watch

    For over ten years, I had a YouTube channel mostly dedicated to my tormented relationship with watches. If you wanted to watch a man losing his mind as he travailed inside the fever swamp of watch addiction, you had come to the right place. Perhaps the algorithms encouraged me to become even crazier for the sake of audience capture. Or perhaps I didn’t need the algorithms. I was doing an excellent job of becoming unhinged by my watch obsession all by myself. Just pause on that for a moment. I didn’t need the algorithms to go crazy. I had done it the natural way. Give me a round of applause.

    But like all good things, that particular kind of crazy came to an end. As I entered my sixties, my bandwidth for dealing with that kind of stress diminished, and new priorities took its place: staying healthy, planning for retirement, and recognizing that I had very little time left to worry about rotating watches on my wrist. As a result, my watch obsession lost much of its intensity. My relationship with watches is vastly different today from what it was even five years ago.

    How much I’ve changed became apparent yesterday when I was cleaning out my office at work. I found a notebook from several years ago in which I had written dozens of what were supposed to be my Master Lists of the Ultimate Watch Collection. In my attempt to arrive at a definitive Master List, I had revised it over and over. Some lists contained only five premium watches. Others had a dozen. Still others fell somewhere in between. I recognized the frenzied handwriting of a man trying to save himself from drowning in quicksand.

    When I opened the notebook and examined those lists, I was overcome with pain. I could see a man dealing with enormous anxiety, using his watch obsession as a diversion from confronting its real causes. Of course, the real causes of anxiety could never have been about watches or the Great Watch Questions: Is my Holy Grail a Tudor, an Omega, or a Grand Seiko? The true causes surely had more to do with love, connection, and mortality.

    But the man who made those lists was oblivious to that fact. He believed that arriving at the Ultimate Master Watch List would somehow bring him peace. He was clearly delusional.

    As I studied those lists, I saw a man struggling with unresolved personal torment. Reading them was painful because they gave me a window into someone I barely recognized. At the same time, I did recognize him, but only from a great distance.

    I was reminded of the terrible scene in The Man Who Would Be King when Peachy Carnehan, played by Michael Caine, holds the crowned head of Daniel Dravot, played by Sean Connery. The crowned head was the end result of a man’s misguided quest to become a god.

    My story was the same but slightly different. In the movie version of my past life, there was no crowned head. Instead, there was a severed forearm with an eight-inch wrist adorned with a luxury timepiece. I was the star of a movie titled The Man Who Would Be Watch.

    Because I’m no longer that man, my YouTube channel has changed. I talk more about the challenges of being in my sixties, retirement, and my misalignment with a world I barely recognize. By charting the course of my actual life, I am violating the principles of social media branding. I’ve deviated from my previous watch obsession, which means I’ve abandoned what business strategists call my content pillars and content buckets.

    A business strategist would shake his finger at me and say, “Do not abandon those content pillars and content buckets. Those are the tools that give audiences recognizable themes, comfort, and familiarity. Those are the tools that keep your audience coming back for more.”

    I would like to offer that business consultant a rebuttal.

    First, I’m all for content pillars and content buckets. I chronicled my watch addiction with honesty and due diligence, but the addiction was like a riverboat on a fast-moving river. It was bound to slow down and enter a tributary. In my case, the tributary was this small matter of age and mortality. I can’t pretend that the riverboat is still at the beginning of its journey. It’s nearing the end. No amount of business strategy, or tossing around terms like content pillars and content buckets, is going to stop that.

    My YouTube channel was always about chronicling my obsessions. If those obsessions were reconfigured by life events beyond my control, such as growing older, then the moral thing to do was to comment on those changes. In that regard, I’ve done nothing to abandon my channel’s mission or brand. I’ve stayed true to it.

    For many years, I was The Man Who Would Be Watch. But now I’m more like Peachy Carnehan. I’m the storyteller. I may be broken and half-crazed, but at least I’m still alive.

    What good is maintaining your content pillars and content buckets if you’re no longer around to deliver them?

  • The Cringe That Defines You

    The Cringe That Defines You

    Cringe television refers to those comedies that bypass sentimentality altogether and go straight for the jugular by creating socially awkward situations–the equivalent of a social car crash–that are almost unbearable to watch. You squirm, gasp, cover your eyes, tell yourself you can’t believe what’s happening, and insist that you need to watch something less distressing. Yet you remain glued to the television, watching in spite of yourself. The Larry Sanders Show, the British and American versions of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and You’re the Worst mercilessly floor the pedal, taking you to the golden nougat of cringe, that horrific center where fallen social graces, eviscerated decorum, spectacular embarrassment, and irrevocable humiliation achieve a ripeness and potency you never dreamed possible.

    We watch cringe television for complex reasons. There is the perverse enjoyment of it, which almost defies psychological analysis, except to acknowledge that we harbor a streak of cruelty that enjoys watching others lose their dignity. But there is also the survivor inside us who wants to learn from these humiliating spectacles so that we won’t follow in these hapless people’s footsteps and suffer their ostracism and disgrace.

    One lesson we learn from cringe television is that the more swollen our egos become, the more stupid and socially unaware we are likely to be. The more aggressively we assert our egotism in social situations, the more we alienate others, often without the slightest awareness that we’re being perceived as pompous, overbearing, bullying, obnoxious, and just plain boring.

    Offering an abundance of cringe is the reality show Below Deck in all its variations. My wife and I were recently watching the Down Under version when chef Ben Robinson decided he deserved to sleep in the more spacious guest quarters for one night to catch up on his sleep. The chief stew explicitly told him not to do so because the bed had been made with clean linens for guests arriving the next day. But Ben, having an inglorious hissy fit, marched into the luxurious guest quarters, messed up the bed, and refused to leave, even after his co-worker, second officer João Franco, urged him to get out.

    Ben Robinson is a talented, intelligent, well-read, articulate chef, but thanks to cringe television, those are not the qualities I will remember. I will remember a broken forty-five-year-old man selfishly violating every rule of decorum so he could indulge himself in the forbidden guest quarters. That episode taught me a painful lesson: A single moment of cringe can be so potent that it obliterates your finer qualities and reduces you to your lowest common denominator in the eyes of others. Whatever Ben does with the rest of his life, I will always see him throwing an infantile tantrum in the guest quarters, clinging to the sheets while João begs him to leave for the chief stew’s sake.

    Regardless of how generous I want to be toward Ben, I cannot erase the image of him behaving like a five-year-old. This is an example of the Reverse-Halo Effect, also known as the Horn Effect, in which one conspicuous negative action contaminates our overall judgment of a person, regardless of that person’s other admirable qualities.

    We all fear becoming victims of the Reverse-Halo Effect. Perhaps that’s one reason we watch cringe television: We hope to immunize ourselves against a similar fate.

    Because my own ego has gotten the better of me on more occasions than I care to count, I’m sure I’ve suffered from the Reverse-Halo Effect myself. I’m therefore in no position to judge Ben Robinson. Like him, I’ve dished up more cringe than is healthy for a lifetime.

    One potential source of cringe I’ve been imagining lately involves telling my co-workers that I’m retiring within a year and then changing my mind. The cat is already out of the bag. Everyone in my department knows I’m retiring. On several occasions, I’ve told colleagues that I’m hanging it up, only to have them interrupt me with, “I know. The word is out.” They’ve been treating me with the warmth and kindness people instinctively extend to someone approaching retirement. It’s a sentimental occasion, after all—the twilight of a career, a time for reflection and appreciation of the good years.

    But after twenty years of watching cringe television, I found myself entertaining a perverse thought: What if I changed my mind? What if, after announcing my retirement to everyone, perhaps even enjoying a retirement party, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the leap? I needed the money. I needed the work routine. I needed human interaction. I needed to be needed. God, how awkward it would be to show up at the fall department meeting the following year when everyone thought I was gone. I could imagine being about as welcome as a bride who wakes up on her wedding day with a boil in the center of her forehead.

    The good news is that I have no doubts about retiring. I will not show up like an unwanted boil next fall. I will be retired. But years of watching cringe television have instilled in me the crazed desire to imagine scenarios that would put me in socially awkward situations. This is surely a terrible use of my time. I would be better off concentrating on avoiding the very real moments of cringe that my egotism produces naturally, without distracting myself with imaginary disasters.

    Ben Robinson, I’m disappointed in you for selfishly messing up those bed sheets, but I can’t judge you. I’ve metaphorically shit the bed too many times in my life to count.

  • Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    Hollywood Has Plans for Your Retirement

    When you retire, you may imagine the trajectory of your final chapters in Hollywood terms because Hollywood has spent your entire life telling you what life is supposed to look like, regardless of how little its stories resemble reality. You may picture yourself as one of the endearing geriatrics in Cocoon, blissfully swimming with friends in a pool that functions less as a swimming pool than as the Fountain of Youth. Hollywood has been selling you fantasies all your life. Eventually, those fantasies seep inside you and become your own.

    It is therefore imperative to understand the kinds of stories Hollywood tells. Hollywood essentially gives us two: the Centripetal Story and the Centrifugal Story. When I explain these narratives to my students, I draw two diagrams on the board.

    The centripetal diagram consists of circles moving inward, becoming progressively smaller. One arrow points toward the center. I call this Circle A. The centrifugal diagram consists of circles moving outward, becoming progressively larger. One arrow points away from the center. I call this Circle B.

    Without explaining what the circles mean, I ask my students to raise their hands if they want their lives to resemble Circle A or Circle B. The overwhelming majority choose Circle B.

    Hollywood has taught them well.

    The Centrifugal Story dominates Hollywood because it offers what audiences want: transformation, expansion, heroism, and redemption. With notable exceptions, Hollywood has little appetite for the Centripetal Story.

    To explain the difference, I begin with a movie Hollywood rarely makes anymore: Citizen Kane. It is not a traditional Hollywood movie because the protagonist is rotten at the beginning and proceeds to rot more thoroughly. My college fiction professor N.V.M. Gonzalez called this process centripetal development. The character does not fundamentally change; he becomes an increasingly concentrated version of what he already is. Charles Foster Kane begins as an egotistical, controlling man hungry for love and recognition. Wealth and power magnify these qualities until they consume his relationships and leave him isolated. Kane does not become someone else. He becomes more completely Kane.

    American moviegoers generally don’t want to watch a character rot. They want transformation and redemption. They want the Centrifugal Story. Casablanca provides the classic example. Rick Blaine begins emotionally closed, cynical, and committed to self-protection: “I stick my neck out for nobody.” Unlike Kane, whose defects become increasingly concentrated, Rick moves outward from the imprisoned self toward other people, moral responsibility, and sacrifice. His love for Ilsa initially tempts him to retreat further into private desire, but in the end he relinquishes her so she can leave with Victor Laszlo and contribute to something larger than any of them. Rick becomes less enclosed by the ego.

    Rick has undergone the classic Hollywood character arc. His old life is finished, and he enters a new world as a new man. Hollywood did not invent this narrative. It inherited it from the conversion story, most famously Augustine’s Confessions. Meghan O’Gieblyn calls this narrative structure the Autobiography: thoughtful reflection on a former life followed by a new life vastly superior to the old one. The structure is seductively tidy. You were lost. Then you were found. The movement is linear. There is no returning because you are dead to the person you once were. Revelation has compelled you to let go of your wastrel existence.

    The problem, O’Gieblyn observes, is that “You cannot understand the meaning of your life while you are still living it.” The conversion narrative solves this problem by allowing you to die without actually dying. Once dead to the old life, you can stand outside it, interrogate it, and contrast that decrepit existence with the person you have become. As O’Gieblyn writes, “Augustine is the father of the genre because he is the one who discovered the crucial loophole: die, then go on living.” Renounce the old life, be born again, and you acquire a second life from which to narrate the first.

    The conversion narrative is also the Hollywood narrative, and if you’re retiring, as I am, you want your final chapters to resemble that unmistakable Hollywood circle: centrifugal, with the arrow pointing outward.

    But after struggling with addiction, recovery, and relapse, O’Gieblyn finds this narrative as hollow as it is seductive. She fought like hell to beat her addictions and make her life “a perfect dovetail of conversion and deconversion narratives.” She wanted a trajectory as tidy as Augustine’s. Life refused to cooperate. She fears that instead of moving confidently outward, she may be traveling in circles. “My life has lost its arc,” she writes, “and I fear that it’s become less a narrative than one of those demented children’s songs that goes around in circles.”

    Yet O’Gieblyn is no nihilist. She still burns for understanding. She still feels compelled to write autobiography as a way of making sense of her failures and triumphs. She still hopes to find some form of wholeness within her contradictions.

    Perhaps those contradictions should not discourage her. Perhaps Augustine’s narrative is simply too neatly ordered to be true. Perhaps children crave cozy narratives while adults learn to tolerate the real stuff, even when the real stuff refuses to provide a feel-good ending.

    Dara Horn explores this problem in her provocatively titled People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present. Jewish literature couldn’t care less about my centripetal and centrifugal circles. Life is too unruly for either trajectory. It is a mishmash of paths. Horn considers our hunger for satisfying endings after a reader complained that her novel The World to Come, centered on the survivor of a pogrom, wasn’t “uplifting” enough. The complaint revealed something curious. Even sophisticated readers want stories to gather their loose threads into a satisfying knot. We want endings that reassure us that the universe is fundamentally coherent, that every life can finally be rendered as Circle A or Circle B.

    Horn is suspicious of this craving.

    Drawing upon Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending, she argues that our expectation of tidy resolution owes much to Christianity. Christian history moves toward fulfillment. Its central drama is redemption. The scattered fragments of existence are ultimately gathered into a meaningful whole. Jewish storytelling, by contrast, is often more willing to refuse closure. The Hebrew Bible ends not with final resolution but with an unfinished journey. Questions remain unanswered. Promises remain unfulfilled. The story continues beyond the final page.

    That difference fascinates me. Christianity often invites us to see history as one enormous redemption arc. Jewish literature is more willing to leave us standing inside the mystery. Rather than explaining suffering, it asks us to endure it. Rather than dissolving ambiguity, it teaches us to inhabit ambiguity with patience and humility. These stories do not pretend that chaos can always be conquered. They suggest that wisdom may consist in remaining faithful while chaos refuses to yield. I wonder whether remaining faithful amid the madness resembles the kind of attention Simone Weil asks us to cultivate as we approach our problems with calm, patience, and perhaps even faith.

    Perhaps that is the more mature vision. Perhaps the Augustinian character arc can infantilize us when we mistake it for a description of how life actually works. Hero stories easily become propaganda because they give us the emotional resolution we crave, whether or not reality warrants it.

    Hollywood has little incentive to tell us otherwise. It traffics in grand mythologies designed to activate our deepest cravings. Consider the 1985 movie Cocoon. It offers a saccharine myth of centrifugal time in which old age becomes an opportunity for expansion rather than contraction. Its elderly characters escape physical decline, rediscover vitality, romance, friendship, and adventure, and ultimately transcend mortality itself by leaving Earth with aliens. Instead of time narrowing their lives toward death, time opens outward toward limitless possibility. Hollywood takes aging, one of life’s great experiences of diminishment, and transforms it into liberation.

    The Centrifugal Story is alive and well.

    The trouble is that it may be more myth than life.

  • Beat the Actuary

    Beat the Actuary

    So, do you want your retirement revenue stream to be as large as possible but stop when you die, leaving your family without that monthly cash injection? Or do you want a significantly smaller amount with the advantage that your spouse and children will continue receiving monthly cash flow after you die?

    If you want the former, you click the Member-Only Option. If you want the latter, you click the Beneficiary Option. Your spouse’s age gets calculated into the equation. Actuarial tables are consulted. You are essentially making a wager on how long you think you will live—and how long you can maintain relatively good brain function while defying dementia—to determine which button you click.

    In my case, other factors came into play. Because of my wife’s relatively young age of fifty, her salary, and the fact that we have already paid off our mortgage, we decided I would click Member-Only.

    After looking coldly at the numbers, the risk factors, and the actuarial tables, I now find myself living in a new dimension. It is not an easy place to inhabit. Because I have never lived here before, I find it difficult to describe. I feel as if my spaceship has crashed on a forbidden planet. I have stepped out of the wreckage to survey the terrain, and everything looks strange and frightening.

    For starters, I’m trying to live as long as possible so my family can receive as much cash flow as possible. Of course, everyone wants to live a long life, but fighting time to maximize monetary rewards makes me feel as if I’m competing on a game show. It’s called Beat the Actuary. The longer I live, the better I game the system.

    Turning my desire for longevity and good health into a form of gamification strikes me as unhealthy, morbid, and deleterious to my spiritual health. Once I start trying to live as long as possible to maximize my family’s cash flow, I am no longer a human being. I am a commodity. The soul takes a back seat. Optimization takes the wheel.

    Optimizing is not living. It’s constantly calculating.

    Cheesecake followed by eggnog at a Christmas party? Tick two months off your life.

    The stress of missing an airline connection from Madrid to New York to Los Angeles? There goes another six months.

    Not taking statins with borderline LDL? Subtract another three years.

    Not embracing the vegan lifestyle? Shave off another five.

    Optimization makes me feel like a fragile egg that must be nestled inside layers of cotton, silk, and cashmere. I am no longer a human being. I am a mausoleum piece inhabiting a glass reliquary, protected from the harsh elements.

    Optimization is not life. It is death.

    So as I walk the terrain of this strange planet and confront these new fears, I am trying to maintain my dignity and live more like a human being and less like a TV game-show contestant.

    But my morbid imagination already gets the better of me. With my birthday coming up in a couple of weeks, I can imagine appearing on Beat the Actuary and being celebrated for surviving another year. The studio audience erupts in applause. Confetti rains down upon me as host Soupy Sales, wearing a banana-yellow blazer, congratulates me for making it through another year.

    At the center of the Beat the Actuary stage stands a twelve-foot-tall hourglass enclosed in a gleaming brass frame, its two enormous glass chambers filled with fine white sand. The sand continues its slow, merciless descent.

    Soupy Sales stares ominously at the giant hourglass. Then he turns toward the camera and fixes the television audience with mock solemnity.

    “Will Jeff McMahon be back next year? Only the hourglass knows for sure.”

  • The Nap of No Return

    The Nap of No Return

    As a lifelong sloth and connoisseur of comfort, routine, and having “everything just so,” I have to be wary of infantilization, the habit of soothing myself by disengaging from the world until I enter long stretches of mindless inertia.

    I am not particularly vulnerable to this dangerous habit in the morning. I write, play the piano, and work out with kettlebells in the garage. But after lunch and my fitful post-workout nap, I am drawn to the couch and my true crime shows. That is where I can become lizard-eyed and begin checking out from life.

    Part of my afternoon retreat is owed to my lifelong inability to sleep well. I haven’t gotten eight straight hours of sleep in more than forty years. I wake from disturbing dreams that are all different and all the same. I’m often traveling in a caravan of people. We are walking or driving along the coast, embarked upon some vague quest. The leader, generally speaking, is not happy with me. I am too grumpy. I am moving too slowly or too quickly. I am going down the wrong path.

    Invariably, I get lost and have to find my way back to the group. I am in a state of great distress. The harder I try to rectify the situation, the worse it becomes. Eventually I wake up and try to process another haunting narrative featuring me as the stray sheep. I go to the bathroom, return to the bed or the couch, where I probably migrated around midnight, put in my earbuds, and hope a podcast will lull me back to sleep.

    My nights of tumultuous, broken, tormented sleep point to the fact that I am a restless, anxious person. Letting go and giving myself over to the moment is difficult, not just when sleeping but in other endeavors.

    Reading can be a challenge, especially when I find myself getting irritated because a book seems padded with fluff. It should have been an essay or a short story, but instead it has been inflated into a 300-page monstrosity of repetition and tedium.

    Sitting through a two-hour movie can prove almost impossible. If the movie features a detective wearing a turtleneck sweater in a balmy climate, I experience vicarious heat exhaustion and have to turn off the television or flee the theater before I suffer a nervous breakdown. When characters eat at a dinner table during a TV show or movie, I lose interest in the plot and start wondering what they’re eating. Soon I am getting an apple from the refrigerator.

    I can relax in certain circumstances. I can sit down at the piano for twenty minutes. Piano is a reliable source of anxiety release, especially when I play for an imaginary audience in which I am the hero. There is something wonderfully relaxing about playing a sonata before imaginary admirers who are being lulled into the same state of relaxation by my piano playing that I am.

    Another reliable source of relaxation is the afternoon consumption of television droning in the background while I descend into a blissful half-sleep condition I call the Womb State.

    An African animal documentary narrated by my trusty guide David Attenborough can put me into the Womb State. A true crime series in which detectives are waiting to learn whether ballistic evidence matches the casings used by their suspect can lull me into the Womb State.

    My deepest, most blissful descent into the Womb State in recent memory occurred when I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, opened Netflix on my phone, and listened to The Big Picture podcast. Listening to the gregarious Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins speculate for two hours about which movies might produce the year’s Best Actor was a euphoric state of relaxation more potent than Xanax or Valium.

    As I am only a few weeks from turning sixty-five and know that my sleep will probably become lighter and lighter, I realize I may depend increasingly on these Womb State pastimes. Opening a streaming app on my phone, putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, and listening to animal documentaries, crime shows, and movie-review podcasts may add fifteen years to my life.

    The problem, of course, is overdoing it.

    When I like something, I tend to overdo it, and the relentless pursuit of the Womb State can result in infantilization.

    As someone whose anxious personality denies him a good night’s sleep, I crave the Womb State as a counterbalance. I crave the soothing sounds of a podcast or documentary while giant cushioned headphone cones surround my ears and I lie on a Beautyrest with diamond-infused memory foam and microcontouring pocketed nano-coils while a Tempur-Pedic pillow cradles my neck. In the proper dose, this afternoon ritual gives me the rest I need.

    Taken to extremes, however, the ritual becomes part of the dark arts.

    The nap with headphones is no longer about rejuvenation. It is about extinction.

    Think of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, a dystopian nightmare in which citizens can choose voluntary euthanasia. They listen to soothing music while immersed in wraparound projections of beautiful landscapes. The government controls these citizens in part through the power of infantilization. There is a fine line between wanting to let go and becoming a helpless, malleable citizen whose self-agency has disappeared forever.

    I therefore need to remain wary of the temptations of infantilization. Napping may provide necessary rest for a man who can’t get a good night’s sleep, or it could be the precursor to the Nap of No Return.

    Just as David Attenborough adds extra gravitas and poignancy to his voice while describing an old alpha lion leaving its pride to die in isolated dignity, I can imagine the fabled naturalist shifting his commentary to me:

    “And here lies a man for whom the nap crept up on him and would not let go. Here in the suburbs, the greatest threat is not a natural predator. It is infantilization.”

  • Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Against Convenience, Except My Convenience

    Convenience is the mother of bad fashion. Think Velcro shoe straps that look less like footwear than medical devices designed for elephantine feet. Think elastic waistbands engineered to accommodate the vicissitudes of your waistline after an unfortunate buffet event. Think synthetic-blend loungewear that is as wrinkle-free as it is odor-harboring.

    But convenience becomes something darker when it promises escape from the natural friction of existence, when the goal is to inhabit a womb-like environment where effort has vanished completely. Think of the Snuggie, that fleece abomination that combines clothing and blanket while announcing to the world that you have become unapologetically dysfunctional. Congratulations. You have reached the apotheosis of bad fashion. You are now wearing your pathology on your sleeve, quite literally.

    If you’re approaching retirement age, you’ll discover an entire industry built around convenience and the premise that after sixty-five your need for it grows exponentially. Follow this road far enough and eventually your life becomes as frictionless as wrinkle-free loungewear, Netflix autoplay, instant oatmeal, and vanilla Ensure.

    You could argue that this is merely another humiliation of old age, another example of one generation falling out of alignment with those behind it. Perhaps that was once true. No longer. We now live in an age when younger generations aspire to much of the same frictionless existence traditionally marketed to the elderly. The generations have finally found common ground: nobody wants to get off the couch.

    This is a problem, according to Gabe Bullard’s Against Convenience, which argues that the mindless pursuit of convenience and frictionlessness can leave us isolated, dehumanized, and infantilized.

    The crank inside me immediately shouts, “Thank you, Captain Obvious, for writing a three-hundred-page padded essay explaining that modern technology has made us lazy.”

    But Bullard has, in fact, written an important, timely, and persuasive book, a much-needed rebuttal to a society mindlessly seduced by the conveniences of modern technology. My crankiness reveals less about the book than it does about my own guilty recognition that I am precisely the kind of person Bullard is writing about. I am, after all, a man who embraces a respectable amount of sloth and convenience. Consider my wardrobe: tank tops, gym shorts, and flip-flops. This ensemble serves as loungewear, sleepwear, errand wear, and exercise wear. Four wardrobes in one. I consider this a triumph of efficiency worthy of self-congratulation.

    Comfort over fashion makes me profoundly happy. When we returned to campus after our pandemic hibernation, my colleagues and I, ranging in age from thirty to sixty-five, seemed to have received the same memo. We wore T-shirts bearing the college logo, dark-wash denim jeans, and extravagantly cushioned walking shoes with names like Brooks Ghost Max 3 and Hoka Bondi 9. These sounded less like orthopedic footwear than race cars capable of reaching two hundred miles per hour at Le Mans.

    Before contemplating the pathologies of frictionless existence in Bullard’s persuasive critique, I made myself a delicious cup of coffee with my Ninja slow-drip coffee maker. It took ten minutes. Then I prepared a bowl of rolled oats with protein powder and berries. Thanks to the microwave, that took fewer than four.

    I am now typing this essay on an aluminum mechanical keyboard while sitting before two 27-inch 4K monitors connected to a Mac Mini smaller than my hand. Its M4 chip runs cool and moves through Google Chrome with frictionless ease.

    I do embrace struggle where I can. I like tackling big ideas, exploring subtexts, locating semiotic signs and symbols in popular culture, considering Zygmunt Bauman’s critique of liquid modernity, and interrogating my consumer longings through René Girard’s notion of mimetic desire.

    But here is the problem for anyone mounting a principled defense of friction: convenience can be delicious.

    This morning’s coffee and oatmeal were predictably stupendous. I’m sitting before two enormous monitors with twelve browser tabs open. Telemann is playing through YouTube Premium, with Boccherini and Rossini waiting obediently in the queue. My computer is cool and silent. My coffee is hot. My oatmeal required almost no labor.

    Perhaps Bullard is right that we need friction.

    I’m just not sure I want it before breakfast.

  • The Smell of Oatmeal at the End of the Universe

    The Smell of Oatmeal at the End of the Universe

    The older you get, the more you can feel like a broken alien—to others and even to yourself. You are no longer quite the person you remember being. This growing sense of estrangement creates a powerful desire to find your way home. You keep your eyes open for breadcrumbs that might lead you back. Sometimes a memory returns with such force that it stops you in your tracks.

    I have my own trail of breadcrumbs. One morning, I sat at the piano while my wife prepared breakfast, a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stove. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was suddenly four years old again, carried back to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires to find a home are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

  • Escape from Margaritaville

    Escape from Margaritaville

    I recently dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it as if they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side. I felt lost. Like a misplaced airport refugee, I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me that I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground for the aged about forty-five miles from Orlando.

    Deep down, I knew I needed to watch this documentary. I was born in Florida, and as my retirement crept closer and closer, I felt an urge to return home. I love the smell of mangos and coconuts at night. Nostalgia is a potent drug. It could cause me to sell my home and buy a condo in Orlando.

    So I watched the documentary. It was the opposite of a travel infomercial. It was a horror movie. It started with synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties. The Villages are marketed as heaven with a tiki umbrella on top, but for anyone with taste, patience, or shame, the place looks more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay people to micromanage your leisure until leisure itself becomes a program of infantilization.

    The film’s most disturbing subject is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who has practiced charm until it has fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment. In a scene that sticks with you, he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He finds his new girlfriend, whom he’s leeching off, annoying. He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it were a slow, merciless clock, and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can become a prison for someone whose last liberty was earned through deceit. As I watched Dennis staring at the ceiling fan, it hit me: He’s in purgatory.

    The director never sneers at his subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable. It’s a retirement complex caught in mid-regression, a carnival mirror reflecting geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The managed fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom. It’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops operation. For a year, I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. She was skeptical about moving to Florida. She mentioned hurricanes and unavailable flood insurance, for starters. Florida also had a reputation for government corruption, contractor fraud, and credit card theft. When her credit card was used fraudulently and she called her bank, the customer service agent asked, “You weren’t in Florida recently, were you?”

    In fact, she was.

    Florida was not paradise. It was a crime syndicate.

    She did not discourage me from watching Some Kind of Heaven. She didn’t have to. The documentary demolished my fantasy of returning to my home state within the first thirty seconds, with its water ballet and sedated margaritas. My obsession evaporated.

    But only for a minute.

    After a quick snack, I was back at my computer looking at luxury condos in Henderson, Nevada.