Cinemorphosis

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  • The Reader I Lost, the Listener I Became

    The Reader I Lost, the Listener I Became

    In terms of reading endurance, I am another casualty of the internet.

    In my early twenties, I devoured two books a week with the discipline of a bodybuilder consuming protein to build muscle. Reading was not a hobby. It was nourishment. My brain felt perpetually hungry, and books were the only food that satisfied it. I read because I was curious. I read because I wanted to flee stupidity. Most of all, I read because life felt incomplete unless I had one foot planted in a parallel literary universe. To be deprived of that universe was to feel vaguely cheated by existence itself.

    Then the internet arrived.

    It did not destroy my appetite for ideas. It fragmented it.

    My attention was gradually colonized by factoids, clickbait, social media surveillance, and articles designed less to illuminate than to be skimmed and forgotten. None of these distractions seemed particularly dangerous on their own. Together, however, they accomplished what no enemy of books had managed before: they quietly atrophied my reading muscle.

    I still read, but my reading is now compromised. In the morning, I work through essays with a cup of coffee, forcing myself to stay engaged by taking notes and writing brief summaries or critiques. At night, I can usually manage another thirty minutes of essays or short fiction before my concentration begins to fray.

    That is a far cry from the reader I once was.

    Yet my longing for that parallel literary universe never disappeared.

    It merely changed mediums.

    Today I spend at least two hours a day listening to audiobooks. I listen before dawn, during workouts, while driving, and sometimes while drifting into an afternoon nap. My library ranges from early Christian history to sports biographies, novels, philosophical polemics, memoirs, and books on health and fitness.

    Although I mourn the loss of my youthful reading stamina, I have discovered an unexpected compensation.

    In many cases, I understand books more deeply by listening to them than by reading them.

    Take Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. I have read the novel obsessively four separate times. Yet hearing it performed through Audible has transformed the experience. I am no longer merely reading about Paul and Luke as they wrestle with believers and skeptics across Greece, Syria, and Israel. I feel as though I am accompanying them. Scenes unfold with cinematic immediacy. Conversations breathe. Sentences I somehow overlooked through four careful readings suddenly reveal themselves with startling clarity. Listening has not diminished the book. It has enlarged it.

    Part of this pleasure may lie deep within our evolutionary inheritance. Human beings spent thousands of years listening to storytellers, poets, prophets, and orators before most people ever encountered literature on a printed page. Perhaps the spoken voice still reaches something ancient within us.

    Another explanation is what I call the Auditory Immersion Principle: the paradox in which a listener comprehends and emotionally inhabits a book more fully through sustained listening than through silent reading because the uninterrupted flow of the narrator’s voice prevents skimming, distraction, and premature judgment. A skilled narrator refuses to let my restless internet brain dart ahead or wander elsewhere. I surrender to the current of the story instead of constantly trying to steer it.

    That discovery has filled me with renewed excitement for books I have postponed for years.

    Near the top of my Audible wish list is Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, a novel Emmanuel Carrère has said transformed his life as a child. I have no doubt that listening to it will transport me into one of literature’s great enchanted worlds. I expect to emerge from it not merely informed but changed.

    The anticipation is almost intoxicating. It feels as though pleasures this profound ought to be reserved for another realm, not made available through a pair of headphones during a morning walk.

    Perhaps that sounds like hyperbole.

    Then again, perhaps that is simply the enduring power of great literature.

    The internet may have weakened my capacity to sit for hours turning pages, but it has not extinguished my desire to inhabit extraordinary books. If anything, audiobooks have reminded me that literature has always been larger than ink on paper. Long before stories were read in silence, they were spoken aloud, carried by the human voice from one soul to another.

    In an age that fragments our attention into thousands of disposable moments, that ancient experience may be more necessary than ever.

  • Wrestling with the Good News

    Wrestling with the Good News

    Three nights ago I dreamed I was alone in a hotel room. Spread across the bed were towering stacks of books and magazines about Christianity. They represented nearly fifty years of reading, questioning, underlining, highlighting, and hoping. I stood over them with the terrible realization that they had brought me no closer to certainty than when I began.

    The dream carried me back to the age of seventeen, when Christianity first overturned my life. What seized me was not the promise of heaven but the terror of hell. I found myself unable to escape the thought that the universe might be governed by a God who had already consigned billions of people to eternal punishment. I never reconciled myself to the doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement, the idea that divine wrath could be satisfied only through the sacrificial death of God’s Son. Yet I was irresistibly drawn to Jesus himself. I wanted to imitate his humility, his freedom from ego, and his radical love for others.

    For most Christians, the phrase “the Good News” evokes joy. For me, it always carried a shadow.

    If the good news was that some of us could escape hell, then the corollary was that most of humanity would not.

    That realization settled over me like a permanent winter.

    I remember working at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits in Berkeley during college. One afternoon a familiar customer, a French immigrant, entered the store with his young son. The boy accidentally dropped a box of puzzle pieces near the register. His father patiently knelt beside him, gathered every piece, smiled gently, and placed them back into the box.

    I watched them and felt an almost unbearable sadness.

    Is this kind father destined for hell? Is his little boy? Is this really the central drama of existence—to rescue people from eternal punishment before it is too late?

    I slipped into the walk-in beer cooler and stocked shelves because I needed somewhere to hide from my thoughts.

    The strangest part of that season was the reaction of my Christian friends. They congratulated me on my conversion. They shook my hand and welcomed me into the family of God.

    One afternoon my high school friend Kevin looked at my face after congratulating me.

    “Aren’t you happy?” he asked.

    I lied.

    “Yes,” I said.

    The truth was exactly the opposite. Even if I somehow managed to be saved, how could I rejoice while imagining that countless others—including decent, loving people like the French father and his son—were marching toward eternal torment? Salvation, as I understood it then, seemed to require emotional compartmentalization of a kind I simply could not achieve.

    So I spent the next several decades reading.

    Believers. Skeptics. Historians. Theologians. Agnostics. Biblical scholars.

    I hoped that somewhere, hidden among thousands of pages, certainty awaited me.

    It never arrived.

    That is what the dream exposed.

    I stood beside the hotel bed and realized those books represented an entire lifetime spent chasing certainty without catching it. My reading suddenly appeared fruitless, almost absurd.

    Then I picked up one magazine.

    Across the cover were the words:

    The Good News.

    I felt rage.

    Those words mocked me.

    The phrase marked the moment my childhood intuition of God as the source of boundless love gave way to a theological universe in which humanity stood beneath an infinite sentence, offered mercy only because divine justice demanded the execution of an innocent substitute.

    And yet another voice interrupts my protest.

    What if I have misunderstood the struggle?

    What if my resistance has less to do with theology than with myself?

    Perhaps I resist Jesus not because his demands are too cruel but because they are too demanding. Perhaps I prefer comfort to sacrifice, autonomy to obedience, self-interest to discipleship.

    Jesus offers no comfortable religion. He tells his followers to surrender wealth, deny themselves, carry their cross, and lose their lives in order to find them.

    His words continue to accuse me.

    Many are called; few are chosen.

    The gate is narrow.

    Why do you call me Lord and not do what I say?

    I want to answer him.

    You told us your yoke is easy and your burden is light. Yet the doctrine of hell has never felt easy or light. It has filled me with sorrow. If my life’s mission is to save as many people as possible from eternal punishment, then existence itself becomes unbearably heavy.

    And yet I cannot imagine a life entirely without you.

    A purely secular existence devoted to comfort, consumption, and personal fulfillment strikes me as equally impoverished. Nietzsche’s Last Man, blinking contentedly amid endless entertainment and consumer pleasures, offers no compelling vision of human flourishing.

    So I remain suspended between two worlds.

    I cannot wholly embrace the traditional theology that first converted me.

    Neither can I embrace a secular life emptied of transcendence.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite biblical image has never been David slaying Goliath or Moses parting the Red Sea.

    It is Jacob wrestling through the night with the mysterious stranger.

    Jacob survives, but he limps for the rest of his life.

    That limp has become the defining metaphor of my own existence.

    For nearly fifty years I have wrestled with God.

    The pain in my hip is the pain of never quite letting go.

  • The Hidden Strength of American Loneliness

    The Hidden Strength of American Loneliness

    In his Atlantic essay “American Loneliness,” Yair Lapid approaches America with the fresh eyes of an outsider. Americans, immersed in their own culture, rarely notice the water they swim in. Lapid does. What he sees is a nation shaped by an affliction so pervasive that many Americans mistake it for ordinary life: loneliness.

    To Lapid, loneliness is not merely being alone. It is exile. He writes, “People like me—the children of the non-American world—are accustomed to thinking of loneliness as a kind of slow sadness. Loneliness is the failure to connect, the disintegration of a family, the collapse of community. Loneliness means you have fallen from a train and are lying beside the tracks, listening to the shriek of the whistle dying in the dark.” What Americans often accept as the inevitable cost of adulthood appears, to someone raised elsewhere, almost biblical in its severity—a banishment into the outer darkness.

    Over the past thirty-five years, Lapid has crossed America repeatedly, driving its highways, stopping at diners, gas stations, drugstores, and roadside cafés. Those travels have led him to reject the fashionable caricature of America as a nation consumed by violence, paranoia, and xenophobia. He has encountered something far less sensational: ordinary people who are generous, decent, and welcoming. The darker portrait of America, he argues, often comes from what he calls the “malicious gossip” of commentators who mistake hyperbole for insight because outrage attracts attention.

    Strip away the exaggeration, however, and one profound truth remains. America is lonely.

    That loneliness began with immigration itself. Millions crossed oceans seeking opportunity, but they paid for it by severing themselves from families, villages, languages, and traditions. They arrived carrying not only hope but also a deep sense of dislocation. Unlike societies that prize the family or the collective, America has long celebrated the self-made individual. The heroic image of the rugged pioneer carries a hidden cost. Independence often means separation.

    Geography reinforces the condition. America is immense. Its vastness allows reinvention, but it also makes disappearance easy. One can vanish into a new city, a new state, or an entirely new life without anyone noticing.

    Progress deepens the isolation. Lapid invokes Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction,” the process by which capitalism continuously replaces the old with the new. New technologies do not simply create industries; they erase them. They dissolve careers, weaken inherited authority, scatter communities, and reorder entire ways of life. Americans have long embraced this relentless churn because they believe tomorrow can be better than today. Yet every leap forward leaves someone standing amid the rubble.

    The Protestant work ethic intensifies the pattern. Americans devote extraordinary energy to achievement, often sacrificing community in pursuit of success. The rewards are undeniable. America has produced astonishing advances in technology, medicine, literature, music, entrepreneurship, and cinema. But the same relentless drive that fuels innovation can also leave people spiritually isolated, making them more vulnerable to addiction, extremism, and despair.

    For Lapid, these forces converge into a startling conclusion: loneliness is not an unfortunate by-product of the American experiment. It is one of its founding materials. As he writes, “Loneliness is not a glitch in the system; it is the raw material from which the system was built.”

    Yet Lapid does not regard this as a fatal weakness. On the contrary, he believes America’s unusual tolerance for upheaval gives it an advantage over many of its rivals. He worries more about Europe, whose attachment to tradition may inhibit adaptation. He is pessimistic about Russia, whose wars threaten to destroy public confidence in the state. He is skeptical that China’s centralized political system can absorb the economic and social disruptions that rapid technological change will bring.

    America, by contrast, has spent centuries reinventing itself.

    As Lapid memorably observes, “America is not a cathedral—it is a workshop.” Workshops are noisy, untidy places where old things are dismantled so new things can be built. They value experimentation over preservation and movement over permanence. Americans have repeatedly endured the loneliness that accompanies such transformation, and in doing so they have developed an unusual resilience.

    Lapid therefore arrives at a paradox. In much of the world, loneliness signals failure, abandonment, or despair. In America, it often signals something else entirely. It is the emotional price of mobility, reinvention, ambition, and progress. Americans do not merely endure loneliness; they incorporate it into their national identity. As Lapid puts it, they are “turning loneliness into a covenant.”

    Whether that covenant is ultimately a blessing or a curse remains an open question. But Lapid persuades us that it is one of the defining features of the American character—a burden that has produced extraordinary innovation even as it has left countless people searching for the connections that progress so often leaves behind.

  • What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    When I uploaded my first YouTube video fifteen years ago, I approached the medium with all the technical sophistication of America’s Funniest Home Videos circa 1990. I had recently fallen under the spell of Seiko and Citizen watches and possessed exactly enough knowledge to be dangerous. I wasn’t a curator. I was a caveman who had just discovered fire. My videos consisted largely of me staring in astonishment at a titanium Citizen Promaster, hoping viewers might catch the same contagious wonder. My outfits were not professional. I was wearing a bathrobe with Cheerios clinging to the lapel and a milk mustache under my nose.

    The set looked as though a laundromat had exploded behind me. Laundry baskets overflowed with unfolded clothes. The lighting was so dreadful that viewers could never be entirely certain whether I was filming from my office or haunting a Medieval dungeon. As for focus, let us simply say that sharp images were treated as an optional feature rather than a design requirement.

    Eventually I purchased a better camera and developed a passing acquaintance with lighting and autofocus. But while I was taking baby steps, YouTube entered the Space Age. Channels began deploying drones over great white sharks, robotic camera rigs that glided through African safaris, helicopters circling erupting volcanoes, and editing suites that looked as though they had been borrowed from Christopher Nolan.

    I, meanwhile, was Fred Flintstone pedaling my Stoneage vehicle into a Tesla convention.

    Curiously, as YouTube marched into the future, I wandered in the opposite direction.

    I rarely make traditional watch videos anymore. Partly that’s because my collection has stabilized. I no longer acquire enough watches to justify another breathless “State of the Collection” update, a genre that now feels about as fresh and exciting as Hootie & the Blowfish.

    But something deeper also changed.

    I became uncomfortable participating in what I now recognize as the economics of envy. Every glossy close-up, every dramatic wrist roll, every thumbnail promising the next grail watch risks manufacturing dissatisfaction in viewers who were perfectly happy with their collections until five minutes earlier. I know because I spent years falling into exactly that trap myself.

    Instead of filming watches, I began interrogating the psychology behind collecting them.

    The channel gradually evolved into something resembling a podcast with occasional wrist shots. I developed a lexicon describing the peculiar madness of watch collecting and eventually self-published a book containing more than one hundred entries. Among them is what I call The Watch Potency Principle: as a collection expands, each individual watch loses a little of its emotional power. Eventually the collector experiences a crisis, sells everything in pursuit of liberation, discovers that liberation is strangely unsatisfying, and begins buying watches all over again. Repeat until death. Tolkien called this Gollum. I called it the process of Gollumification. 

    Having spent years dissecting the disease, I find myself with surprisingly little left to diagnose.

    That leaves my YouTube channel in an awkward adolescence.

    I don’t want to retire it because I genuinely enjoy making video essays. But I no longer possess the manic enthusiasm that algorithms adore. I am still a watch collector, just no longer in my Peak Addiction Period. Unfortunately, emotional equilibrium is terrible for audience engagement. YouTube rewards obsession far more enthusiastically than contentment.

    The truth is, I am also an extraordinarily boring man.

    I live in suburban Torrance. There is precious little cinematic drama in watching me search for a parking space at Costco, call a plumber when the shower backs up, or negotiate a family summit over the proper method for removing a daddy longlegs from my daughter’s bedroom wall. The algorithm craves spectacle. I offer plumbing invoices.

    People sometimes ask why I don’t pivot into politics.

    The answer is simple. Modern politics has become professional wrestling with legislation attached. Policy increasingly serves as the pretext for performance. Every public figure must become either the Hero or the Villain. Every disagreement requires apocalyptic language. Every debate ends with someone declaring civilization itself to be on the brink of collapse.

    I have no talent for that performance because I can see the stage directions.

    If my channel survives, it has to survive because I mean what I say, not because I have mastered the latest choreography of outrage.

    So here I am.

    I am sixty-four years old. I have spent forty years teaching writing, fifty years lifting weights and obsessing over nutrition, and twenty-five years collecting watches. By any reasonable measure, I should know exactly who I am.

    Instead, I find myself confronting an unexpected truth.

    I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

    Perhaps that uncertainty is no longer something to hide.

    Moving forward with the uncertainty is the story.

    If my YouTube channel has a future, I suspect it won’t be about watches at all. It will be about what happens after the obsessions cool, after the algorithms lose interest, and after a man discovers that the hardest collection to curate is not the one in his watch box, but the unfinished life still ticking quietly inside himself.

  • I’m a Radio Man Trapped in a YouTube Video

    I’m a Radio Man Trapped in a YouTube Video

    On the final episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca—who is leaving to assume an executive role at a still-undisclosed institution—lamented the passing of an older form of media. He spoke about the intimacy of hearing a voice without being forced to watch it. A voice enters your home stripped of spectacle. It asks for attention rather than demanding it. It does not require jump cuts, dramatic lighting, animated captions, exaggerated facial expressions, or an algorithm trained to hijack your dopamine receptors. Pesca admitted that one reason he was ending The Gist was simple: he no longer wished to compete in the circus.

    He spoke warmly of Julia Turner, whose Culture Gabfest has also come to an end. He noted that Marc Maron has little interest in becoming another video personality. Although Pesca didn’t mention them, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported have similarly resisted reshaping their podcast into a YouTube product. Pesca observed that the retirement of Maron, the disappearance of Culture Gabfest, and the end of The Gist signal “the end of an era.”

    Listening to him, I realized I have been mourning that era for some time.

    Shortly afterward, David Greene closed an episode of Left, Right & Center by announcing the retirement of NPR’s Don Gonyea. Another unforgettable voice was disappearing from my daily life. I found myself oddly saddened. I wasn’t losing a face. I was losing a companion. Don Gonyea will be missed. So will Marc Maron. So will Mike Pesca. 

    It finally dawned on me while listening to Mike Pesca’s farewell episode of The Gist: I spent fifteen years making YouTube videos, but I was never really a YouTuber. I was a radio man trapped inside a YouTube video.

    I have never formed a deep attachment to YouTubers or Instagram personalities. I connect with voices. I grew up in the age of radio, when a voice carried enough authority to build an audience and enough warmth to become part of a family’s routine. I still remember the oversized preset buttons on my parents’ turquoise Chrysler Newport as Dionne Warwick asked if we knew the way to San Jose and The 5th Dimension floated “Up, Up and Away” through the speakers. In the 1970s, my mother’s Panasonic RF-1080 seemed permanently tuned to KGO 810 AM. Jim Eason, Jim Dunbar, and Ron Owens narrated our days with such consistency that they became as essential to the household as breakfast. When we visited my grandparents in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson drifted through the house while conversations about politics, books, and current events unfolded around him. Living among ideas was not an extracurricular activity. It was simply what adults did.

    Some of my happiest childhood memories involve nothing more than lying on a couch or sitting on the porch while an AM radio broadcaster called a baseball game. Those voices carried me into a dream world more comforting than the one outside my front door. Even now, I suspect that paradise sounds less like angels singing than a baseball announcer calmly describing a lazy fly ball to center field.

    When podcasts emerged in the early 2010s, they felt like radio reborn. I loved the voices. I loved the predictability. A good podcast possessed architecture. It opened with one segment, moved naturally into another, and arrived at a satisfying conclusion. As a writing instructor whose life revolves around lesson plans, outlines, and coherent arguments, I appreciated that structure. A podcast respected the listener’s attention instead of treating it as prey.

    Video rarely shows the same respect.

    Too often, it reshapes personalities into algorithmic caricatures. Everyone speaks with theatrical urgency. Every thumbnail depicts someone whose eyes appear to have witnessed the Second Coming or an alien invasion. Every headline promises that everything you believe has just been DESTROYED. Outrage has become less an emotion than a production budget.

    The internet has perfected a new facial expression: the clickbait gasp. Apparently, no thought is complete until someone opens his mouth wide enough to swallow the thumbnail.

    I find the entire performance exhausting.

    When I think back to watching The Dick Cavett Show as a ten-year-old, I remember almost nothing about the visuals. I remember Cavett’s voice—curious, literate, skeptical, and wonderfully patient. He made intelligence sound inviting rather than performative. Listening to him, I wanted to inhabit a world where thoughtful people spoke in complete sentences, entertained competing ideas, and considered nuance a virtue instead of a liability. Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of elitism in me. If a conversation lacked subtlety, I assumed it lacked seriousness.

    Reflecting on Pesca’s farewell forced me to confront my own fifteen years on YouTube.

    Technically, I have always been hopeless. More than once I filmed a watch review so badly that the watch itself remained stubbornly out of focus while the comments section delighted in informing me of my incompetence. As YouTube evolved into an increasingly polished medium—with cinematic lighting, drone footage, elaborate editing, and graphics worthy of cable television—I never evolved with it.

    Nor, I eventually realized, did I want to.

    My interest gradually shifted away from close-up glamour shots of luxury watches and endless “State of the Collection” videos. I became more interested in why we chase possessions than in the possessions themselves. My videos became essays disguised as watch content. The algorithm, understandably, was unimpressed.

    Recently I noticed that six weeks had passed since I uploaded a video.

    I am not abandoning the channel. But I have become suspicious of speaking merely because the algorithm demands another upload. I have no desire to become someone who mistakes constant broadcasting for having something worth saying. Every new video should earn its existence. It should contribute something I have not already said. It should reflect genuine conviction rather than anxiety about disappearing.

    Perhaps that standard is impossibly high.

    Or perhaps it is simply what growing older feels like.

    I am sixty-four now. The older I become, the less interested I am in producing content and the more interested I am in producing thought. The algorithm rewards frequency. Age rewards discrimination.

    If I have learned anything from listening to voices like Mike Pesca, Don Gonyea, Dick Cavett, Jim Dunbar, and Marc Maron, it is that the medium was never the point. The point was never to command attention. It was to deserve it.

    Maybe that is the real end of the era—not the disappearance of podcasts, but the fading belief that a single thoughtful voice, speaking without spectacle, is enough.

    I hope it still is.

  • Breaking Bad for the Book of Romans

    Breaking Bad for the Book of Romans

    The great stories of the Bible—Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, Moses, David, Job, Jesus, and Paul—deserve to be reimagined as a series of prestige television miniseries, each spanning ten meticulously crafted episodes for a platform such as Hulu or Netflix. The goal would not be to produce religious propaganda or anti-religious satire. The series would avoid both sanctimony and cynicism. Its allegiance would be to literature, art, and compelling storytelling.

    Just as audiences were captivated by Walter White’s extraordinary moral descent in Breaking Bad, they could be equally captivated by Paul’s astonishing transformation on the road to Damascus. Few character arcs in world literature rival its dramatic force.

    Just as we recoil from the nihilistic corruption of Sodom and Gomorrah, we recoil from the feral moral depravity that consumes the Roy family in Succession.

    After reading the work of biblical scholars, believers, agnostics, and skeptics alike, I have come to appreciate that the Bible possesses an artistic and literary power that transcends theological debate. Its stories are filled with psychological depth, moral ambiguity, epic conflict, and unforgettable characters. Faith may shape how viewers interpret these narratives, but it need not determine whether they are moved by them. If adapted with intelligence and artistic courage, these stories could stand alongside the greatest achievements of modern television—not because they preach, but because they illuminate the enduring drama of the human condition.

  • The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose was the stage name bestowed upon Jeff McMahon, a college writing student, bodybuilder, and part-time laborer at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits on Tunnel Road beside the Claremont Hotel. From 1983 to 1987, the store hosted wine tastings three evenings a week. There were bottles from Bordeaux, Napa, and Tuscany, a polished grand piano in the corner, and customers who came expecting Cabernet, Brie, and melancholy in equal measure.

    The ritual never varied.

    McMahon would be hidden away in the walk-in cooler stacking cases of beer or downstairs wrestling heavy crates of wine. His black T-shirt was perpetually torn, his forearms tattooed with cardboard abrasions, nicks from broken bottles, and fresh cuts courtesy of overzealous box cutters. He looked less like a concert pianist than a dockworker who had taken a wrong turn into a music conservatory.

    Soon someone at the tasting bar would ask, “Where’s Lachyrmose?”

    Another voice would join in. Then another. Before long the room itself seemed to chant for him.

    Store owner Solomon Khan, who understood that theater sells almost as well as Chardonnay, would smile knowingly. If every chair around the tasting bar had been claimed, he would haul out more until the room resembled an impromptu recital hall. Only then would the Great Lachyrmose make his entrance, emerging dramatically from the cellar or the refrigerator like some wounded Romantic hero ascending from the underworld.

    Without ceremony he would sit at the piano and spend the next hour filling the room with mournful nocturnes, elegiac waltzes, and slow-moving ballades that drifted through the store like woodsmoke on a winter evening. Conversations softened. Wine glasses paused halfway to waiting lips. Even the cash register seemed embarrassed to interrupt.

    The most enchanting audience members were the neighborhood’s young mothers.

    They would arrive carrying restless infants whose nightly resistance to sleep had exhausted every parental strategy except surrender. Somehow the Great Lachyrmose accomplished what rocking chairs, lullabies, and desperate pacing could not. One melancholy piano piece after another worked its quiet spell until tiny eyelids surrendered. The babies collapsed into peaceful sleep with astonishing reliability. Their grateful parents would offer Lachyrmose a smile and a gentle nod before slipping out into the Berkeley night, precious cargo cradled carefully in their arms.

    It became one of the strangest guarantees in town. Jackson’s could promise good wine. Lachyrmose could promise sleeping babies.

    As the years passed, however, something inside the pianist began to shift. He grew restless with his own success. He wanted brighter harmonies, quicker tempos, unexpected turns. He wanted music that laughed as often as it sighed.

    His audience revolted.

    The regulars did not come for experimentation. They came for emotional comfort. They wanted the familiar sorrow they had come to love, returning to those melancholy melodies with the same devotion families reserve for a grandmother’s chicken pot pie. Every new composition was politely tolerated before someone inevitably asked for one of the old sad songs.

    Success had quietly become a cage.

    The Great Lachyrmose had become a prisoner of his own repertoire.

    So when McMahon accepted his first college teaching position, he quietly retired the character and left Jackson’s behind. For the first time, he could play whatever music interested him rather than whatever melancholy his audience wished to hear.

    He gained artistic freedom, but he lost something as well.

    He lost the strange little community that had gathered around a grand piano in the corner of a wine shop. He lost the nightly ritual of emerging from the cellar to a room full of expectant faces. He lost the grateful parents carrying sleeping babies into the darkness.

    Even now, decades later, he occasionally misses the Great Lachyrmose. The music has changed. Life has changed. But belonging—that rare feeling that one’s peculiar gifts answer someone else’s unspoken need—is not so easily replaced.

  • The Artist and the Fundamentalist

    The Artist and the Fundamentalist

    In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield argues that the artist flourishes only within a civilization wealthy and stable enough to afford “the luxury of self-examination.” Such a culture gives artists the freedom to create because it believes in human progress. It assumes that, however flawed humanity may be, those flaws can gradually be overcome. Art and humanism therefore become inseparable. The artist is sustained by the conviction that mankind is moving forward, and art is both evidence of that progress and one of its engines.

    I grew up dimly aware that my family and their friends subscribed to this liberal humanist vision. I found it comforting. I accepted its assumptions without much reflection because they made the world seem orderly and hopeful. Yet I cannot honestly say I embraced its ideals. My ambitions were narrower. The world’s problems belonged to someone else. My concern was building a pleasant kingdom for myself. Beyond the walls of that kingdom, humanity would simply have to fend for itself.

    Only later did I recognize what Pressfield sees as the shadow cast by humanism. Opposing it is not merely pessimism but fundamentalism.

    Fundamentalism begins with the conviction that human beings are too fallen, too corrupt, and too powerless to redeem themselves. Salvation cannot come through gradual human improvement; it must arrive through divine revelation or absolute doctrine. That revelation may come through Moses, Jesus, Muhammad, Karl Marx, or any other figure invested with unquestionable authority. If Pressfield were writing today, he might extend the list to include secular gurus whose followers seek not merely advice but complete personal transformation.

    Regardless of the prophet, the psychology remains the same. Fundamentalism grows from humiliation, alienation, and the longing for certainty, belonging, purpose, and power. The believer attaches himself to a leader whose doctrine promises nothing less than total metamorphosis. On this point, Pressfield’s analysis closely parallels that of Eric Hoffer in The True Believer, who argued that mass movements flourish among people desperate to escape the burdens of individual identity.

    History provides familiar examples. Pressfield notes that Hebrew fundamentalism intensified during the Babylonian captivity. White Christian fundamentalism expanded in the American South after Reconstruction. Germans embraced the mythology of the Master Race following the national humiliation of World War I. The particulars differ, but the emotional architecture remains remarkably consistent.

    At the heart of every fundamentalism lies a fear of freedom.

    Freedom sounds exhilarating until one remembers what it demands. To be free is to risk failure. It is to lose the comforting structures of tribe, clan, village, and inherited identity. As Pressfield writes, freedom often produces “the dislocation and emasculation experienced by the individual cut free from the familiar and comforting structures of the tribe and the clan, the village and the family.”

    The fundamentalist recoils from this uncertainty. He does not want the open horizon of modernity. He wants the closed gate of certainty. He retreats into an imagined golden age where moral boundaries are fixed, identities are unquestioned, and every problem has already been solved. As Pressfield puts it, he “gets back to basics. To fundamentals.”

    In this sense, modernism and humanism become close allies. Both assume that humanity can shape its future, define itself, and allow individuals to flourish according to their own talents and choices. Fundamentalism, by contrast, turns its face toward the past. Its paradise always lies behind it.

    This explains why Pressfield concludes that fundamentalism and art are fundamentally incompatible. “Fundamentalism and art are mutually exclusive. There is no such thing as fundamentalist art.”

    Art thrives on ambiguity, exploration, imagination, and discovery. Fundamentalism demands certainty, conformity, and obedience. The artist creates. The fundamentalist polices. Where the artist opens possibilities, the fundamentalist narrows them. His creative energies are redirected toward destruction—not necessarily of buildings alone, but of ideas, books, institutions, and people perceived as threats to the sacred order.

    No figure occupies the fundamentalist imagination more completely than Satan.

    His greatest creative act is the continual reinvention of evil itself. Satan may appear as rock music, fantasy novels, Hillary Clinton, Bill Gates, Oprah Winfrey, Hollywood, secret cabals, lizard people, transgender ideology, vaccines, or universal healthcare. The names change with the generation, but the psychological function remains constant. Evil must always have a face. The fundamentalist spends so much time imagining Satan that he develops an almost obsessive fascination with the very force he claims to despise.

    Pressfield’s concept of Resistance appears in both worlds, but it assumes opposite meanings.

    For the artist, Resistance is the inner force that tempts one toward laziness, distraction, and fear instead of disciplined creation. For the fundamentalist, Resistance becomes temptation toward sin. His response is not artistic labor but deeper immersion in sacred texts, ritual, and ideological action. His mission is not to create a better future but to restore a purified past in which everyone submits to the same moral code.

    Humanists may believe in God, but they see themselves as collaborators rather than passive subjects. They become, in Pressfield’s phrase, “co-creators,” working alongside the divine to improve the world while allowing individuals to flourish according to their unique gifts. The fundamentalist regards that very freedom as rebellion. Individual autonomy becomes apostasy.

    Humanism flourishes where societies enjoy prosperity, stability, and hope. Fundamentalism flourishes where humiliation, scarcity, and inequality convince people that freedom has failed them. Under those conditions, many become willing to exchange liberty for certainty, even if certainty demands submission to an oppressive vision of the past.

    For Pressfield, the struggle to produce art therefore becomes more than a personal discipline. It becomes a civilizational duty. Art enlarges human freedom. It nourishes the forces that move civilization forward while starving those that would drag it backward into fear and absolutism.

    Yet the deepest battle is never merely political. It is internal.

    Pressfield concludes with an observation that echoes across philosophy and theology alike: “The paradox seems to be, as Socrates demonstrated long ago, that the truly free individual is free only to the extent of his own self-mastery. While those who will not govern themselves are condemned to find masters to govern over them.”

    These final lines remind me of Paul. In Romans, Paul confesses that he cannot master himself. He longs to do what is right, yet repeatedly finds himself doing the very thing he hates. His will is divided. His moral resources are exhausted. Left to himself, he cannot overcome his own depravity and must therefore throw himself upon the mercy of Christ.

    At first glance, Paul’s confession resembles the psychology Pressfield attributes to the fundamentalist. Both begin with an acknowledgment of human brokenness and the inadequacy of individual willpower. But the resemblance may end there.

    Pressfield’s fundamentalist flees freedom because it terrifies him. Unable to bear uncertainty, he surrenders his judgment to an authoritarian doctrine that promises absolute certainty, rigid purity, and the restoration of a mythical golden age. His faith expresses itself through conformity, ideological warfare, and the relentless identification of enemies. He seeks salvation by submitting to external authority and demanding that others do the same.

    Paul’s theology points in another direction. His surrender is not to an ideology but to grace. Rather than claiming moral superiority, Paul begins by confessing his own moral bankruptcy. Rather than condemning outsiders, he first indicts himself. The transformation he seeks is not the recovery of a glorious past but the creation of a new heart. His dependence on God is meant to produce humility rather than triumphalism, compassion rather than self-righteousness, and freedom from sin rather than domination over other people.

    Yet the distinction remains difficult to untangle.

    Does Paul’s doctrine of grace ultimately liberate the individual, or does it still require the surrender of autonomy that Pressfield warns against? Can genuine freedom ever arise from admitting one’s inability to save oneself? Or does every appeal to divine authority contain the seeds of authoritarianism? Is Pressfield correct that self-mastery is the highest form of freedom, or is Paul correct that true freedom begins only when we acknowledge the limits of self-mastery and accept grace?

    These questions haunt me during both my waking and sleeping hours. I have not resolved them. I suspect I may never fully resolve them. But the struggle itself—the struggle to understand freedom, discipline, grace, and human flourishing—has become one of the defining pursuits of my life.

  • The Hairball Apocalypse and the Courage to Snake a Drain

    The Hairball Apocalypse and the Courage to Snake a Drain

    Hair buildup in the shower drain has clogged the primary bathroom about half a dozen times over the past twenty-four years. The warning signs never change. Murky, fetid water begins rising inside the marble shower basin, and with it rises my imagination. Within seconds I have diagnosed tree roots invading the pipes, a collapsed main sewer line, catastrophic plumbing failure, and the financial ruin that surely follows.

    Reality is considerably less cinematic.

    We’re talking about hair.

    I have called plumbers in the past. This time I decided to become one—or at least impersonate one.

    I borrowed my neighbor’s hand-held auger and spent the evening crouched over the shower, sweating through my shirt while my knees protested every minute on the tile floor. The auger finally broke through the clog. Victory. I turned on the shower, watched the water disappear, and congratulated myself.

    Two minutes later the water was pooling again.

    Apparently, I had not defeated the enemy. I had merely tunneled through it.

    So I waited for the water to drain, fed the auger back into the pipe, cranked again, and tried another test. This time the shower remained clear for nearly three minutes before surrendering once more to the same soggy defeat.

    The diagnosis had become obvious.

    I needed to go deeper.

    My neighbor owns a drill-powered auger, but when I borrowed the manual one around seven o’clock the previous evening, he answered the door wearing a bathrobe and dripping wet after climbing out of his hot tub. It seemed an inappropriate moment to ask for a plumbing tutorial. Some acts of neighborliness should have limits.

    Today I’ll borrow the powered version.

    Better yet, I have already bought my own. I ordered a RIDGID Power Spin, which works either by hand or by attaching it to my DeWalt drill. The hand crank removes, the drill locks onto the drive shaft, and suddenly I possess a machine whose existence I was blissfully unaware of forty-eight hours ago.

    The RIDGID arrives in a couple of days.

    Now I have to learn how to use the thing.

    This matters for reasons that extend well beyond one clogged shower.

    In principle, I should not have to pay someone hundreds of dollars to spin an auger down a drain. In principle, I should not become helpless every time a clog predictably appears after business hours, on a weekend, or during a holiday. In principle, I should understand that knowledge and self-reliance are among the most effective antidotes to anxiety.

    The clog itself was never the real problem.

    My ignorance was.

    There are, it seems to me, two kinds of homeowners. The first sees a wad of wet hair, sighs, reaches for the proper tool, and solves the problem before dinner.

    The second sees the identical clump of hair and imagines collapsing sewer lines, excavators in the front yard, and a plumbing invoice large enough to require grief counseling.

    I have spent too much of my life belonging to the second category.

    My goal is to graduate into the first.

    So I will arm myself with knowledge, a RIDGID Power Spin, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing the difference between a plumbing emergency and a hair clump masquerading as one.

    Of course, I also bought plumber’s gloves, work goggles, knee pads, and heavy-duty coveralls.

    I only hope they transform me into a competent handyman.

    Otherwise, I have merely assembled an exceptionally convincing handyman costume.

  • Why a Watch YouTuber Like Myself Must Not Commit the Sin of Narrative Overstay

    Why a Watch YouTuber Like Myself Must Not Commit the Sin of Narrative Overstay

    For fifteen years you made YouTube videos, most of them about watches and the peculiar form of madness that convinces otherwise rational adults that the next dive watch will finally complete them. By now, you have mapped the terrain. You have dissected the psychology of acquisition, status, collector fever, diminishing returns, and the fantasy that fulfillment lies one purchase away. There is little left to excavate. Every new video feels suspiciously like an old one wearing a different thumbnail.

    Meanwhile, you have changed.

    You are sixty-four. Your curiosity has wandered far beyond bezels, lume, and power reserves. You want to make video essays about books, politics, religion, technology, aging, and the strange civilization we have built for ourselves. But YouTube has little interest in intellectual wanderers. It rewards specialists. The algorithm is less a patron of curiosity than a prison warden, forever reminding inmates to stay inside their assigned cell.

    You could obey. You could continue manufacturing watch videos until retirement.

    But doing so would require confronting a condition I call algorithmic senescence: the stage in a creator’s life when the platform’s demand for endless specialization collides with the creator’s natural intellectual evolution, making continued participation feel less like mastery than slow decay.

    The decay itself, however, is not the real tragedy.

    The greater loss is dignity.

    I have developed an almost visceral aversion to seeing myself on camera. It is tempting to blame vanity, age, or the unkindness of high-definition video, but none of those explanations reaches the heart of the matter.

    The face is not the problem.

    The performance is.

    I no longer look like a man animated by genuine fascination. I look like a man trying to resurrect yesterday’s enthusiasm because today’s algorithm still pays for it. There is a painful difference between devotion and obligation, and the camera captures that difference with forensic precision. The eyes know. The voice knows. The audience knows.

    What appears on the screen is not passion.

    It is lingering.

    It is the unmistakable look of someone who should have exited several scenes earlier but remains onstage because he cannot quite bring himself to leave. Every upload risks looking less like an act of creation than an appeal for relevance.

    This is another condition entirely.

    It is Narrative Overstay: the unsettling realization that one’s public story has reached its natural conclusion, yet one continues performing it out of habit, audience expectation, or financial inertia.

    The internet is crowded with practitioners of Narrative Overstay. Aging influencers desperately imitate the mannerisms of younger creators. Musicians spend decades touring on songs they no longer inhabit. Television series limp through unnecessary seasons because the ratings remain adequate. Politicians mistake longevity for indispensability. Everyone keeps performing after the story has quietly ended.

    The audience often cannot identify exactly what has changed.

    They simply sense that something essential has departed.

    The urgency is gone.

    The necessity is gone.

    Only the content remains.

    So, for now, I write.

    A blog imposes no algorithmic lane. It allows curiosity to roam wherever it pleases. One day I can write about Frederick Douglass, the next about ultra-processed foods, then TikTok, theology, watches, democracy, or the peculiar sadness of algorithmic civilization. The only governing principle is whether the subject deserves thought.

    Perhaps I will return to YouTube someday.

    But if I do, it cannot be because an algorithm has assigned me another shift inside the watch factory.

    It must be because I once again have something I cannot keep myself from saying.

    Until then, my dignity depends on remaining off camera.