Cinemorphosis

Blog

  • Lost in the Gasbaggerate

    Lost in the Gasbaggerate

    Scripture, if you strip it of incense and italics, offers a blunt warning: don’t build your life on display. Ostentation is not a virtue; it’s a leak. It drains whatever substance you have and then pretends the shine is the thing itself. I think about that now, with the benefit of hindsight and a modest inventory of regrets, and I return to my early twenties at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, just down the road from the well-coiffed calm of the Claremont Hotel.

    Jackson’s was a holding pen for the overqualified. My coworkers were armed with advanced degrees—literature, linguistics, anthropology, chemistry, physics, philosophy, musicology—and a shared conviction that the adult world had failed them first. Institutions were beneath them. Corporations were vulgar. Authority was for other people. So they took their talents to the wine rack and poured them into attitude.

    They sold Bordeaux and Belgian ales with a cultivated disdain for both product and purchaser. Customers were a nuisance; humanity, a disappointment. The house philosophy could be summarized in a single phrase, delivered with a raised eyebrow: “service with a smirk.” Irony was their armor and their currency. They wore it everywhere.

    What I didn’t see then—but can’t miss now—is how perfectly this posture trains a man in gasbaggery. It rewards the performance of intelligence over the practice of it, the pose of superiority over the discipline of work. You learn to talk rather than to build, to signal rather than to serve. You become fluent in contempt and call it discernment.

    It felt like elevation. It was, in fact, a form of drift—polished, articulate, and entirely unmoored.

    Over time as we drifted into complacency and lost awareness of our arrogance and folly, we became unwitting members of the Gasbaggerate: a self-appointed guild of eloquent overtalkers who mistake endurance for insight and airtime for authority. Its members gather—physically or online—to exchange monologues disguised as dialogue, each contribution longer, louder, and more self-satisfied than the last. They pride themselves on nuance but deploy it like a garnish, sprinkling just enough complexity to justify their verbosity while never approaching a conclusion that might end the performance. In the Gasbaggerate, listening is considered a quaint hobby, brevity a moral failing, and the highest form of achievement is to leave a room convinced that something important has been said, even if no one can quite recall what it was.

    During the wine store’s slow hours, we would display our commitment to the Gasbaggerate by discussing the philosophical curiosities of Nietzsche, the musical excesses of Wagner, and the literary conundrums of Kafka. In many ways, the job had become my comfort zone. It offered me no challenges, yet at the same time, it afforded me the delusion that I was smarter than most people. Whatever I lacked in finances, I compensated with excessive self-regard. Over time, it became clear to me that the longer I worked alongside these proud misfits, the more certain I would become incurably unemployable. 

    I was drawn to the idea of becoming part of my co-workers’ elitist tribe. Though I had nearly completed my master’s degree in English, I never felt like a good fit for academia. I rarely read what professors had on their syllabi. Instead, I would read what I wanted to read, regardless of its relevance to the class content. I could barely sit still during class. I became restless, fidgety, self-conscious, and prone to social anxieties. It was rare that I ever listened to the professors’ lectures. My mind tended to wander about random worries–my bleak romantic prospects, the lack of airflow inside the classroom, my loathing of driving in traffic to get to the gym after classes, and the absence of high-protein food in my house. I didn’t even like the physical presence of the university with its modern sculptures on the lawns, plaques dedicated to a variety of stodgy luminaries, and the fluorescent-lit classrooms reeking of industrial disinfectants. When people asked me what I majored in, I told them, half-seriously, that I was majoring in “Get the Hell Out” because my discomfort with college compelled me to rid myself of academic life as soon as possible. 

    In contrast, I was comfortable being a professional slacker at the wine store. Cultivating my irony and sarcasm with my coworkers and the regular customers was my Happy Place. In the lax work environment, I was confident I could go on indefinitely. My paycheck would be too small to buy new cars or pay for medical insurance. Still, the superior physical and spiritual health I could enjoy from “not selling out to the mainstream” would be worth the risk of having to pay out of pocket for the occasional dose of antibiotics. 

    In my mid-twenties, I was content to spend the rest of my life being a slacker clerk at the wine store, throwing a Nerf football ball to my co-workers through the aisles of Chianti and Beaujolais, and expounding on the mysterious writings of Jorge Luis Borges, Alberto Moravia, and Miguel de Unamuno. 

    Then one day in the late summer of 1987 I was kicked out of my comfort zone and became the Accidental Professor when my friend Mike Elizalde’s father, Felix Elizalde, a top administrator at Merritt College, begged me to teach for his college when none of his real English professors would get off their asses and teach a special Bridge Program at Skyline High School.  “But Mr. Elizalde, I don’t know anything about teaching. I don’t even have a credential.” The chancellor of community colleges said, “No problem,” and I heard his dot matrix printer in his office churning out my California Community College Teaching Credential. I stared at the document like Luke Skywalker seeing for the first time the glowing saber. 

    Of course, the freshly-printed credential didn’t magically transform me into an actual college professor. This became evident one afternoon while working at the wine store and pouring Braren Pauli merlot to a Cal Berkeley professor in the wine bar. I anxiously confided with him that I was terrified about my new job as a college instructor and the dread I felt for having absolutely no idea what I should be doing in the classroom. With a mane of gray lion’s hair and matching beard, the scholar sipped his merlot, studied me carefully, and told me, “Being a professor is the same as being a carpenter. You bring your materials to the classroom and you and the students build structures together. There will be many occasions when the students won’t want to be in the classroom and they will resist everything you say. Though silent, their collective presence will create an air of hostility in the room. You will have the strong impression that you are talking to yourself and a part of you will die inside. This is where your professionalism kicks in. Through sheer ego and professionalism that demands that you get through the course objectives, you have to ignore their indifference and execute your craft the way a carpenter would build a house.”

    Thirty-five years later, I would like to tell him that I never forgot his advice, but I would not tell him the part where on some occasions I would plow through a lecture that was received by the students with implacable indifference, drive home questioning the purpose of my existence, collapse on my bed, curl into the fetal position, and cry myself to sleep.

    The Berkeley scholar proved to be right. The best philosophy was to show up to class prepared, brimming with the confidence from that preparation, but be prepared for the students to be disaffected and disengaged at times for reasons that had nothing to do with me but everything to do with their personal concerns: a distressing romance, an aching hunger, money problems, family disputes. Forces were affecting my students’ interest levels that I could not control. If I were to survive as an instructor, I had to acknowledge this brutal fact; on some occasions, I had to be prepared for the ego sting of disengagement and feeling I was talking to myself in a room of thirty-five people, then power my way through the class objectives even when I didn’t feel popular and “loved.” The sooner I realized the classroom was about them and their concerns, and not mine, the better off I would be.

    Being a successful instructor meant more than being a carpenter. It also meant finding ways to remove my Selfish default setting and entertain the radical proposition that I was not put on Earth to be loved but rather to be of service to others. But to be successful at a job that almost came to me as a freak accident, I would have to struggle to remove depart from my role as a navel-gazing narcissist performing as a know-it-all at a dead-end job. 

    Had Felix Elizalde not administered a well-timed kick to my posterior in 1987 and pushed me into teaching at Merritt College, I might have perfected the art of professional drift—clocking in at Jackson’s, polishing my ego to a high gloss, and mistaking self-display for a life. That alternate version of me required no great catastrophe. It was the path of least resistance, paved with vanity and lightly dusted with delusion.

    We love to credit ourselves with vision, ambition, the mythology of the self-made man. It’s a flattering story: lone hero, steady climb, destiny fulfilled. My life refuses to cooperate with that narrative. It looks less like a conquest and more like a rescue operation—dependent on other people’s interventions, good timing, and the occasional lucky shove in the right direction.

    Remove those external corrections—none of which were earned by my sterling character—and I suspect I would have settled into a comfortable swamp of mediocrity, happily narrating my own importance while achieving very little. I would have been busy talking, less busy becoming.

    That’s the part we don’t advertise: how close most lives are to going quietly off the rails. Not in flames, but in drift. Extinction doesn’t always arrive as catastrophe. Sometimes it shows up as a man who never quite got started and never quite noticed.

  • The Limits of Gasbaggery

    The Limits of Gasbaggery

    Comparison is a reliable factory of misery. At sixty-four, with retirement in sight, good health, a wife, and twin daughters under the same roof, I possess the raw materials of a decent life. Yet a few minutes of comparing my gasbaggery with the professional gasbags–my favorite podcasters and YouTubers–and the arithmetic collapses. I measure my output against their reach, my voice against their polish, and conclude—too quickly, too confidently—that I am a small, forgettable thing. This kind of self-excoriation is a symptom of comparison collapse: the rapid psychological deflation that occurs when one measures a competent, grounded life against the amplified success of public figures, resulting in an exaggerated sense of smallness untethered from reality.

    If I want to be a professional gasbag, I suppose I could become an online influencer. I have a good communications background, having taught college writing for forty years, but my qualifications stop there. In truth, I have no skills or interests worthy of making me an influencer. I don’t feel compelled to sermonize college writing online. I’ve trained my body for decades, but I have no appetite to package kettlebells and nutrition into content as if they were revelations. I love wristwatches, but talking about them only seems to exacerbate my already debilitating timepiece addiction. 

    Knowing I can’t be an influencer makes me drift into a soft, theatrical lament: I wish I could be somebody–a gasbagger with lots of reach. I succumb to the fallacy: “If only I could become a professional gasbagger, I’d find happiness. Woe is me.”

    To combat my self-pity, I think of my daughter and I playing Yahtzee. When the dice fall short of glory but still land on something usable—a Full House, a Small Straight—we shrug and say, “I’ll take what I can get.” It’s a small sentence with a sturdy backbone. Life does not hand out only Yahtzees or their analog, a life of glory and fanfare. Life offers partial wins, mixed hands, and the occasional quiet competence. Taking what you can get is not surrender; it is calibration. It means knowing the difference between what can be improved through discipline and what must be accepted without drama. It is not mediocrity. It is accuracy.

    The second idea is less a principle than a confession: I cannot will myself into being a YouTube star. I do not have the desire to edit for twelve hours a day, to hype products, or to rehearse insights that anyone can find with a competent search. My attention, such as it is, doesn’t belong so much to my YouTube channel about watch obsession these days as much as it belongs to a small corner of the internet—my less popular piano channel with fewer than eighty subscribers. There, I introduce a piece, play it, and accept the likely outcome: twenty views, one generous like. It is a modest exchange, but it is honest. I am not forcing a persona into existence; I am following a thread that feels like mine.

    This refusal to force myself down a path that doesn’t align with my heart reminds me of a basic truth from yoga. Some days the body opens and the breath cooperates; I go into a state of sweat-induced bliss from the exercise intensity, but about one day every two months, the joints resist, the mind wanders, and the practice feels like a negotiation with gravity. On those days, you do not escalate the conflict. You ease back. You take the version of the practice that the day allows. I see the same pattern on the exercise bike. Most sessions render about 700 calories per hour; but once a month or so the legs turn to lead and the numbers sag. Two days ago, I posted a modest 500 calories and left it there. No drama. No verdict. The next ride would likely return to form. It usually does. It wasn’t the Yahtzee of exercise bike sessions. It was the Full House. 

    So when I hear the voice of envy and my self-grandiosity pouring out operatic self-pity with remarks like “My life is so paltry,” and “Why am I not the YouTube star I deserve to be?,” I have to remind myself I can discipline and push myself to be a better person and make a better life without forcing myself to do things that aren’t driven by my heart or things that are spurred by comparing myself to others. 

    Though I lack the reach of my favorite gasbags–Sam Harris, Mike Pesca, Katie Herzog, Jesse Singal, Andrew Sullivan, Jonah Goldberg–I am nevertheless a gasbag albeit on a smaller scale. They are the Yahtzees. I am the Full House. 

    I am not succumbing to mediocrity. I am simply stating my place on the Gasbag totem pole with the objectivity of reporting the weather. 

    Seething with envy or undergoing some sort of “rebranding” probably won’t change the situation. I’d rather occupy my modest space with a modicum of grace than spend my remaining years as a bitter, self-appointed understudy, convinced that the spotlight was stolen.. 

    As a lifetime gasbagger with the boorish grandiosity of Commander McBragg, I am seeking Full House Acceptance: The sober recognition that most lives are built from partial wins—modest reach, limited audience, quiet competence—and the decision to inhabit that reality without resentment.

    Not all gasbags are created equal.

    And not all of them need to be.

  • Gasbaggery Has an Expiration Date

    Gasbaggery Has an Expiration Date

    Yesterday I stepped into a small knot of colleagues in the corridor, that narrow strip of campus where ideas briefly outrun the clock. We traded jokes about the recent Canvas collapse in which all our attendance, grading records, and lesson plans evaporated due to hackers demanding ransom money; we congratulated ourselves for having our lectures safely parked on Google Slides, and circled the usual anxiety about AI—this new auditor that has wandered into the classroom and begun asking uncomfortable questions about our usefulness. The conversation had the easy rhythm of habit. No one spoke as if I were leaving.

    So I reminded them: I’m close to sixty-five with forty years of teaching under my belt. I have one year to go.

    S shook her head as if I had announced a mild illness. I shouldn’t retire, she said. I thrive on the friction of the place—the chatter, the debate, the daily collision with students. I am a gasbag extraordinaire. Besides, she added, men don’t retire well. Men don’t cultivate friendships the way women do; they don’t maintain the networks that keep the emotional weather from turning bleak. 

    I admitted what I already know. I have two friends. I see them rarely enough to qualify as seasonal.

    “I’m an appetizer,” I said. “People enjoy me in small doses.”

    S dismissed that with a wave. “No. You’re a sprawling Las Vegas buffet.”

    The hallway erupted with laughter. It was a generous line and a dangerous one. Flattering, because it confirmed what I trade on: conversation, wit, the ability to animate a room. Terrifying, because buffets are not known for cultivating long-term friendships, and I have no second act of friendships waiting in the wings.

    Oddly, the exchange reinforced my decision to retire in spite of my good physical health. Staying on the job to stave off loneliness is a poor reason to keep a desk. It erodes dignity and, eventually, the quality of the work itself. A classroom deserves more than a man using it as a social life raft.

    The conversation ended the way these corridor encounters always do—with a sudden glance at the time and a polite tearing-away, each of us sprinting back to our assigned rooms before we become late versions of ourselves. Those moments are rare and bright—half a dozen a year, if that—and they carry a dangerous illusion: that their warmth can be stretched across an entire calendar.

    They can’t.

    I will miss them. I will miss the quick intelligence, the laughter, the feeling that something alive is happening just outside the classroom door. But a handful of good conversations a half dozen times a year does not justify postponing an ending that has already announced itself.

    I could stay three more years. I would be sixty-eight, still having the same conversation in a slightly older voice. My challenges would not change; only the date would. Delaying the inevitable is not a strategy. It’s a habit.

    So I’ll leave while the hallway still feels like a gift—and before it becomes an excuse.

    All those years of campus gasbaggery must have lifted me—socially, psychologically, perhaps even spiritually—in ways I can’t quite quantify. What I can measure is my dependence on that lift. I’ve grown accustomed to the daily inflation: the classroom as stage, the captive audience, the steady drip of relevance. Remove that, and I’m left with the unnerving question of what remains when the applause stops.

    Now I find myself at a crossroads that isn’t really a crossroads at all. I can learn to construct a new life—quieter, less theatrical, possibly more honest—or I can cling to the old one with the desperation of a man hugging a sinking ship, all while calling it dignity. That second option has the appeal of familiarity and the stench of denial.

    So let’s not pretend this is a choice. Retirement is not a whimsical lifestyle pivot; it’s a forced course correction, a deviation imposed by time whether I approve or not. I’m frightened, yes—but fear, unlike tenure, does not come with the option of renewal.

  • A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    A Close Fight by the Frozen Peas at Trader Joe’s

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

  • The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    The Protein Prophet Meets Late-Stage Capitalism

    You spent a lifetime preaching the gospel of whey protein to a congregation that greeted you with eye-rolls and the occasional “musclehead” slur. Undeterred, you carried yourself with the calm arrogance of a man who knows the future and is watching everyone else arrive late. While they dabbled in fad diets and moralized over carbs, you quietly mixed your whey protein scoops—one in the morning over your groats, another in the afternoon with yogurt—like a chemist of hypertrophy. You hit your macros. You built your muscle. You extended your health span. And best of all, you did it on the cheap.

    You were right.

    Which is where the trouble begins.

    Now the world has caught up, and like all converts, it has arrived with a fanaticism that would make you blush. GLP-1 users clutch whey like a lifeline to their disappearing muscle mass. Aging populations treat it as insurance against frailty. Influencers chant “protein-maxxing” as if it were a sacrament. Food companies, never ones to miss a profitable crusade, have stuffed protein into everything short of tap water—cereal, ice cream, pancakes, corn chips—each product whispering, You, too, can be righteous.

    The result? Demand has detonated. Prices have surged. The humble tub of whey—once the blue-collar ally of the disciplined lifter—now sits on the shelf with the smug expression of a luxury good. Up 50 percent. Maybe doubling next year. The powder of the people has been gentrified.

    So tell me, prophet of protein, how does it feel?

    You wanted vindication. You got it. You wanted the world to recognize the power of protein. It has. You are no longer a fringe eccentric. You are mainstream. You are validated.

    And you are paying for it.

    There was a time when you were a misunderstood zealot, buying your whey in peace, your habits dismissed as obsessive but harmless. Those were the golden years—the years of ridicule and affordability. Now the masses have joined you, and like all mass movements, they have driven the price of entry skyward.

    You didn’t just win the argument.

    You priced yourself out of it.

  • From Plastic Panic to Teak Charcuterie Board Theology

    From Plastic Panic to Teak Charcuterie Board Theology

    After watching a documentary on microplastics—the kind that makes you feel like you’ve been chewing on a credit card your entire adult life—I purged my kitchen of polymer cutting boards with the zeal of a man burning cursed artifacts. In their place, I installed three bamboo boards: handsome, virtuous, and morally superior. They gleamed with the smugness of objects that require hand-washing. No dishwasher. No shortcuts. You don’t clean them; you tend to them. I accepted this as the price of purity.

    A month later, domestic reality intervened. We needed a larger board. Naturally, I upgraded—not to another bamboo slab, but to a teak charcuterie board thick enough to stop a bullet and elegant enough to host a minor European summit. When I opened the box, however, I discovered that teak is less a cutting surface and more a lifestyle commitment. It must be moisturized. Neglect it, and it dries, cracks, and becomes a microbial timeshare. The bamboo boards, I learned, share this delicate temperament. So much for rugged simplicity.

    Now, once a month, I conduct what can only be described as a ritual. I anoint each board—front and back—with a tablespoon of mineral oil, as if preparing it for a minor sacrament. They sit overnight, absorbing their glossy absolution while I contemplate the path that brought me here.

    The plot thickened when I discovered that plain mineral oil, while admirable, is apparently the beginner’s drug. The connoisseur graduates to a blend of mineral oil and beeswax—a two-in-one elixir promising water resistance, durability, and, one suspects, moral clarity. Another twenty dollars vanished. The boards, I was assured, would now repel moisture with aristocratic disdain.

    I like to think of myself as a man who values simplicity. Reality suggests otherwise. Without meaning to, I slid down the polished banister of the healthy lifestyle rabbit hole. It begins with a reasonable fear—microplastics—and ends with a cabinet of oils, waxes, and maintenance schedules that would make a museum curator nod in approval. There’s a name for obsessive food purity—orthorexia nervosa—but this feels broader, more ambitious. This is what I would call Total Purity Syndrome: the quiet transformation of daily habits into sacred rites, where deviation carries the faint odor of moral failure.

    To be clear, I haven’t sealed myself in a sterile dome, subsisting on filtered air and ethically sourced chia seeds. I’m not auditing my oxygen intake. I’ve simply spent about a hundred dollars on cutting boards and would prefer they not crack, warp, or harbor microscopic civilizations. That’s not pathology. That’s stewardship.

    Still, there is something revealing in the arc: a man who set out to eliminate plastic and ended up with a monthly oiling ceremony. Progress, it seems, has a way of recruiting you into its maintenance plan.

  • The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    The Man Who Eats Sandwiches Over the Sink

    My YouTube channel, now more than a decade old, has gathered over 11,000 subscribers and delivers anywhere from a polite 700 views to a respectable 5,000, depending on how shameless I’m willing to be. The high performers are predictable: watch reviews and those ceremonial “State of the Collection” videos—rituals of conspicuous enthusiasm that the algorithm devours like a starving dog. These are the videos where I feel myself performing, angling, posturing. I can practically see the hook in the water. I am not expressing myself; I am fishing. And the bait is always the same: dopamine, desire, envy, and that most reliable narcotic of all—FOMO. These are not just videos; they are small moral compromises dressed as content. They feed what the famous therapist Phil Stutz calls the “lower channel.”

    Then there are the other videos—the ones where I sit back and become a kind of rambling talk show host, reflecting on the week, my thoughts, my minor existential skirmishes. I sprinkle in a bit of watch talk as a courtesy to the faithful, but the real subject is the human condition, or at least my version of it. These videos are closer to the truth. Naturally, they struggle to crack a thousand views. Authenticity, it turns out, is not algorithm-friendly.

    This creates a tidy little crisis. Do I continue manufacturing these glossy, attention-seeking performances—feed the beast, play the game, become a caricature of myself? Or do I choose integrity and accept the role of a man speaking into an increasingly empty room? If the audience shrinks in proportion to my honesty, why not go all the way—abandon video altogether and disappear into a novel no one will read?

    The problem is, I’m not built for that kind of monastic focus. Eighty thousand words on a single idea feels less like a creative challenge and more like a prison sentence. I prefer miscellany. I like to ricochet between obsessions: watches, my adolescent bodybuilding fantasies, the enduring mystery of my own arrested development. I am, by any reasonable definition, a man-child with a specialty in distraction.

    Take food. Not just eating—how I eat. I am obsessed with meals that can be held in one hand: tacos, burritos, sandwiches, wraps—portable architecture. The ideal scenario involves standing over the kitchen sink, dispensing with plates, silverware, and any trace of ceremony. It is efficiency elevated to philosophy. Why sit down when you can hover? Why clean dishes when you can bypass them entirely? This is my idea of innovation: reducing life to its lowest possible friction. Call it optimization if you’re feeling generous. Call it laziness if you’re not.

    And yet, paradoxically, I am disciplined—ferociously so—when it comes to exercise. Olympic lifting in my youth, kettlebells and power yoga now. But even here, discipline is the wrong word. This is compulsion. I don’t train because I choose to; I train because I need to. The workout is less a virtue than a medication, a daily dose of relief for a mind that resists stillness.

    My days split cleanly in two. Morning brings optimism: coffee, steel-cut oats with protein powder, the illusion of infinite possibility. I feel like a serious person, a thinker, someone on the verge of producing meaningful work. By night, the illusion collapses. Fatigue sets in, mood darkens, and I retreat into a fog of lethargy and low-grade dread. The same man who greeted the day with ambition now negotiates with anxiety before sleep, wondering what small catastrophe might arrive in the dark. Will the dream render me so helpless I have a heart attack? Will I even wake up from this dream or succumb to eternal slumber? 

    Hovering over all of this is a private mythology, one I’ve borrowed—perhaps stolen—from Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” I cast myself as the misunderstood artist, the outsider, the man quietly suffering for his craft. It’s a flattering fiction. In reality, I’m less tortured genius and more well-fed procrastinator—an enthusiast of shortcuts, a collector of appetites, a man who stands over the sink eating a breakfast burrito while postponing his lab work. The cholesterol test can wait. The scale will sort itself out. The fantasy persists.

    And that, I suppose, is the truth: I oscillate between aspiration and avoidance, between the higher and lower channels, between the man I imagine myself to be and the one holding a sandwich over the sink.

  • The New Gospel of Masculinism: May It Be Short-Lived

    The New Gospel of Masculinism: May It Be Short-Lived

    There are moments when the temperature of a culture reveals itself in a single, unsettling proposition. One such moment arrives when a public figure calmly suggests that women should not have the right to vote—and is met not with universal condemnation, but with a shrug, a debate, or worse, applause. Douglas Wilson, a 72-year-old preacher, has made such arguments, presenting them as part of a broader theological vision in which women are cast in supporting roles to male authority. This is not fringe theater performed in a basement. It has bled into the mainstream. That Pete Hegseth is associated with Wilson’s denomination is less an isolated curiosity than a symptom. What should be aberrant now passes as another point on the menu.

    In her essay “The Men Who Want Women to be Quiet,” Helen Lewis names the ideology underwriting this drift: masculinism. In this worldview, men are protagonists and women are props—non-player characters in a game whose rules were allegedly written by Saint Paul. The result is an ungainly mashup: scripture folded into the hustle economy, sermon braided with sports betting tips, theology seasoned with crypto schemes and supplement codes. It’s less a philosophy than a product line—an all-in-one kit for grievance, packaged for easy consumption.

    If this sounds marginal, Lewis argues otherwise. Masculinism, she writes, has become a unifying current, pulling together pastors and podcasters, politicians and online personalities into a loose but potent coalition. It thrives in a moment when many men feel displaced—watching women surpass them in education and professional advancement—and are hungry for a narrative that restores their primacy. Enter the influencer-preacher hybrid, eager to monetize that hunger.

    Wilson, by Lewis’s account, is willing to adopt tactics borrowed from professional wrestling—kayfabe—to amplify his reach. The persona is exaggerated, the provocations theatrical, the outrage intentional. The goal is not persuasion so much as provocation. Trauma becomes currency. The more offended the opposition, the more validated the performance. In this economy, cruelty isn’t a bug; it’s a feature.

    The rhetoric does not remain confined to gender. Figures like Nick Fuentes demonstrate how misogyny can serve as a gateway—an entry point into a broader ecosystem of resentment and prejudice. Repetition does the rest. Shock becomes familiar, then tolerable, then unremarkable. The grotesque is normalized through sheer exposure.

    This is, in part, the byproduct of a media environment optimized for reaction rather than reflection. In a landscape dominated by short-form content and algorithmic amplification, complexity loses to caricature. Men and women are flattened into types—heroes or villains, victims or oppressors—with little room for the inconvenient details that real thinking requires. As Lewis puts it, the masculinist imagination reduces women to trivial professions and men to blunt archetypes, a world rendered in crude strokes for quick consumption.

    Even cultural barometers shift. Joe Rogan, once loosely aligned with progressive politics, has drifted in a direction that reflects this broader realignment. The movement is not accidental; it is structural, propelled by incentives that reward outrage and certainty over nuance.

    And yet, there is a limit to how far exaggeration can stretch before it snaps. Lewis suggests masculinism may be entering its phase of overreach—the point at which its claims become so inflated, so historically tone-deaf and morally coarse, that they begin to alienate even sympathetic audiences. When grievance is equated with atrocities, when rhetoric collapses into parody, the movement risks discrediting itself.

    Whether that correction arrives soon enough is another question. For now, we inhabit a culture where the abnormal has learned to pass as normal, and where the loudest voices often mistake performance for truth.

  • The G-Shock Square GW-S5600 Vanishes in More Ways Than One

    The G-Shock Square GW-S5600 Vanishes in More Ways Than One

    I’ve had the G-Shock GW-S5600U-1JF on my wrist for about twenty hours. The initial impressions were encouraging. The carbon strap finally accommodates my 8-inch wrist without negotiation—I land comfortably on the third-to-last hole. The watch is astonishingly light, almost evasive, and every function behaves as advertised.

    Then my displeasure began.

    First, the presence—or lack of it. On the wrist, the watch reads smaller than its dimensions suggest. It doesn’t anchor itself; it hovers. At a glance, it recalls a Fitbit—more lozenge than instrument—an object that seems designed to be forgotten. Its small size is its first vanishing act.

    My second displeasure is reception. My other G-Shocks behave like disciplined students, checking in with Colorado every night without complaint. The S5600, by contrast, requires coaxing. Last night, lined up at the window with its larger siblings, it alone refused to sync. At one in the morning, I found myself manually initiating reception, a small ritual of disappointment.

    But the real issue revealed itself this morning: legibility. The watch sits so flat against my wrist that even a slight tilt sends the display into retreat. The digits don’t fade—they vanish. The viewing angle feels narrow, unforgiving, as if the watch demands a precise alignment before it agrees to be read. The vanishing numbers are a vanishing act I really don’t like.

    This is not a minor inconvenience. It is a structural flaw. A watch that requires negotiation at every glance begins to feel less like a tool and more like a chore.

    Which leaves me with an unappealing conclusion: I may have to sell it. Not because it fails outright, but because its virtues—lightness, subtlety, restraint—don’t compensate for its flaws.

  • A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    A Society That Has Sacrificed Interiority for the Next Dopamine Hit

    In “Has College Gotten Too Easy?”, Joe Pinsker notes a curious inversion: grades rise as the quality of student work declines. He borrows a distinction from a Harvard sociologist—“easy” can mean lighter material or looser grading—and suggests the latter is doing most of the work. From where I sit, it’s both. Around 2010, as reading skills began to erode, writing instructors quietly trimmed the syllabus. Fewer essays, fewer books, and almost nothing long. The last time I assigned The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a 500-page climb, the backlash was volcanic. Students weren’t being asked to read; they were being asked to endure. It felt less like instruction and more like pitting a white belt against a black belt and calling it pedagogy.

    Something fundamental shifted at the same moment. The smartphone didn’t just arrive; it reprogrammed. We moved from readers to watchers. As readers, we practiced interiority—the habit of turning language inward until it took root. Sentences weren’t skimmed; they were inhabited. Ideas weren’t collected; they were argued with, revised, made to answer to memory and conscience. Interiority is not mere comprehension; it is a private workshop where meaning is built, not downloaded.

    Around 2010, that workshop closed early. In its place came what I’ll call dopaminergic exteriority: attention pulled outward by a conveyor belt of novelty—short videos, endless scroll, perpetual interruption—until thought has no time to cohere. The mind becomes a relay station for images, optimized for reaction rather than reflection. The inner dialogue thins to a whisper; the feed does the talking.

    The consequences show up in the classroom. Interiority tends to produce patience, skepticism, and a tolerance for difficulty—the raw materials of maturity. Exteriority produces the opposite: impatience, certainty without evidence, and a preference for the quick hit. Ask for Moby-Dick and you’ll get a highlight reel about “the great whale” in thirty seconds. The novel becomes a rumor; the rumor earns the grade.

    Institutions adapt. They always do. Assignments shrink. Expectations soften. Grades inflate to meet the new baseline of attention. Students, understandably, demand high marks for low friction; colleges, increasingly, oblige. The result is not a conspiracy but a convergence: a curriculum calibrated to the scroll.

    We tell ourselves this is access, flexibility, modernization. There’s some truth in that. But there’s also evasion. A watered-down education is what you get when a culture trades interiority for the next stimulus. We begin to prefer performance to thinking, identity to argument, and ease to effort. We stop reading the world and start skimming it.

    None of this is irreversible, but it is cumulative. Interiority is a practice; it returns when practiced. Assign the long book again. Require the sustained argument. Give students something that resists them. Not because difficulty is virtuous, but because without it, the mind never learns to stay.