Cinemorphosis

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  • Safari Hats and Leviathan Eyes

    Safari Hats and Leviathan Eyes

    Last night I dreamed my wife and I were walking along a South African beach at twilight, the sky streaked with salmon and violet, the horizon shimmering as if we had stumbled into a myth rather than a place on any map.

    The coastline was no ordinary shore. Instead, a massive conveyor belt rattled along the sand, carrying an endless parade of women from every corner of the globe. Each time one of them reached my wife, the belt shuddered to a halt. The woman—frumpy, froggy, apologetic, swaddled in baggy safari khakis and hats that looked like they had been flattened in a suitcase—would plead for my wife’s opinion on her outfit.

    With gentle authority, my wife made her adjustments—a tuck here, a trim there—and declared the woman presentable. At once, the supplicant would bow effusively, glowing with gratitude, before the conveyor belt whisked her off into the twilight. This was my wife’s destiny, her sacred vocation, and she bore it with effortless grace.

    Behind us, the ocean brooded. From the waves, leviathan shapes drifted in the gloom, colossal witnesses to this human pageant of absurdity. Their eyes glowed with the cold contempt of ancient gods, as if to say: This is what civilization amounts to—hats and hemlines, endlessly corrected.

    The dream inspired me to write a song this morning, “The Sadness of Summer Fashion”:

  • When Music Turns Against You

    When Music Turns Against You

    Nearly twenty years later, I’m still haunted by a radio interview with a musician whose name I’ve long forgotten. She wasn’t a star, but she’d carved out modest success as a songwriter and performer—until she stopped cold. Her lifelong depression had once been soothed by music, but eventually the very act of making it turned corrosive. What had been balm became poison. The emotions beneath her songs were too raw, too jagged to face. She not only put down her guitar; she banished all music from her life. While others found sweetness and solace in melody, she heard only torment. For her, silence was the only refuge. She spoke as someone exiled, barren, cut off from a source of joy she could never imagine welcoming back.

    Most music, for me, carries happy and nostalgic weight. When a song pulls me back to a moment when I was unbearably lonely or making a fool of myself, I may wince—but I don’t hold the song responsible. Instead, I value it as a powerful marker, a bookmark that divides my life into bold chapters, each melody reminding me exactly where one ended and the next began.

  • Beyond Believers and Unbelievers

    Beyond Believers and Unbelievers

    In Reflections on the Existence of God, Richard E. Simmons insists on a binary vision of reality: you either believe in God through the Judeo-Christian tradition, or you reject God altogether, joining the ranks of atheists in the mold of Freud or the New Atheists. A committed Christian, Simmons even agrees with atheist Sam Harris that “atheism and Christianity compete on the same playing field.” In this framing, the contest is nothing less than a duel for human souls, with consequences both temporal and eternal. As Simmons puts it: “The question of God’s existence, in my opinion, is the most significant issue in all of life.”

    Drawing on Armand Nicholi’s The Question of God, which stages a philosophical match between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud, Simmons argues that if Lewis is wrong, then Freud must be right: the universe is empty, silent, and loveless. In that case, we are forced to embrace this “harsh reality,” stripping away “false hopes and unrealistic expectations.”

    But Simmons’ stark either/or feels more like caricature than clarity. Not all who reject Christianity are Freud’s disciples. Many non-Christian seekers believe in benevolent spiritual forces larger than themselves. Phil Stutz in The Tools and Steven Pressfield in The War of Art both describe transcendent realities—love, creativity, solace—that hardly resemble Freud’s existential bleakness.

    Even within Christianity, belief is hardly monolithic. The theology of a Calvinist and that of a Universalist are galaxies apart. To affirm substitutionary atonement is to worship a very different God than the believer who rejects it. The label “believer” is too blunt to capture these divergences. Hyam Maccoby, the Jewish scholar who wrote The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, is a believer in God, yet he spends his book dismantling Paul, another believer. Sometimes believers are harsher with each other than with atheists.

    Framing the world as a cosmic battlefield of believers versus unbelievers oversimplifies both camps. Reality is more complex, and spiritual life cannot be reduced to an either/or ultimatum.

  • Maybe There’s a Friendship Renaissance Waiting for Retirees, Or Maybe There Isn’t

    Maybe There’s a Friendship Renaissance Waiting for Retirees, Or Maybe There Isn’t

    In a recent conversation with Mike Moynihan on The Moynihan Report, media analyst Doug Rushkoff described social media life as a kind of self-inflicted madness: we willingly lobotomize ourselves into shrill binaries, flattening nuance until the “other side” is little more than a demon enemy. His words echoed Jaron Lanier’s decade-long dirge about how the online hive mind debases us into cheap caricatures.

    After fifteen years inside this funhouse, I can vouch for Rushkoff. Chasing likes and subs is a direct pipeline to despair. The algorithm isn’t designed for truth or connection — it’s a slot machine that spits out dopamine crumbs in exchange for outrage and hype. And yet, podcasters like Rushkoff and Moynihan point to a counterargument: in the right hands, social media can host intelligent conversations. But it’s a fragile victory, like surviving on a vegan diet — possible, but you’ll work twice as hard and swallow twice as much chalk.

    Socially, though, the medium is barren. Scroll long enough and the promise of “connection” curdles into loneliness.

    This hits me harder as retirement creeps closer — twenty-one months and counting. I’ve spent forty years teaching face-to-face, and I’ll miss it desperately. This semester I have student-athletes: sharp, disciplined, driven, engaging. Those classroom connections have been the marrow of my career, and they won’t be replicated by a Facebook feed.

    I’ll still have a family. I’ll still have two best friends in Torrance. But unlike my wife, who maintains a weekly social circuit of concerts, trips, dinners, and parties, my friendships are skeletal. Months-long “friendship fasts” punctuated by rare meetups. Husbands, as the cliché goes, lean too heavily on their wives for connection — a weight she may already feel pressed under. An isolated husband becomes a burden.

    You reap what you sow. Neglect friendships for decades, and you retire into isolation, wondering if you can still course-correct. Maybe it’s too late. Maybe habit calcifies into solitude.

    Or maybe not. Maybe there’s a friendship renaissance waiting out there: gray-haired amateur philosophers huddled at gritty diners, pickleball warriors at dawn, retirees solving the world over coffee. Maybe the beach yoga crowd will embrace me.

    Or maybe that’s just wishcasting. We’ll see.

  • SZA in Our House: Why My Daughters and I Sigh When Taylor Swift Comes On

    SZA in Our House: Why My Daughters and I Sigh When Taylor Swift Comes On

    In my freshman writing class, I recently staged a little spectacle about thesis statements. To illustrate contrast, I pulled out two cultural heavyweights: SZA and Taylor Swift. Hyperbole was the hook. My admiration for SZA was real; my critique of Swift was exaggerated for theatrical effect. Still, my tirade sounded more like a roast than a teaching tool:

    “While Taylor Swift may rack up 25% more Spotify streams than SZA, numbers don’t tell the whole story—unless, of course, you mistake a stadium chant for art. SZA sings with depth and raw emotion, while Swift wheezes through her catalog like an underfed Victorian orphan. SZA’s sound is bold, kaleidoscopic, and alive, drawing from the lush soul of the ’70s. Swift, meanwhile, serves up limp sonic garnish—music with the texture and excitement of a wilted celery stalk rescued from beneath the fridge. SZA makes adult art; Swift makes musical mac and cheese for the kid’s menu at Chili’s.”

    In reality, I don’t think Swift is a wasteland of celery stalks and Victorian wheezing. I admitted to my students that Swift is likely a good person, a competent artist, and that I wish her well. My guilt lingered, though. Bombast is a teaching trick, but sometimes the fire singes the wrong target.

    That guilt sharpened when I stumbled across Spencer Kornhaber’s “How Did Taylor Swift Convince the World That She’s Relatable?” over morning coffee. One line hit me like a cold shower: “The most consequential American singer of the past 20 years, Swift can claim commercial achievements that equal or surpass those of the Beatles, Madonna, and Michael Jackson.”

    Relatability is her true superpower. Swift has broadcast her heartbreaks, doubts, and longings in ways that make her sound like a big sister or Greek chorus to her fans’ lives. Her brand isn’t just pop—it’s therapy with a backbeat.

    Kornhaber nails it: “Listening to a Swift song is like eating a candy bar that transmits a personal essay into your memory. If you eat enough candy bars, it becomes a novel, and then a series of novels, and then (this is when you become a Swiftie) a virtual-reality, open-world video game you play with friends and strangers.” It’s a metaphor that could apply to any great artist. I thought of The Truman Show, where daily life becomes the commodity, the spectacle, the art.

    Swift deserves her accolades. She is a master craftsman of polished, radio-ready memoir-pop. But her songs still strike me as a touch bland, like a dependable frozen dinner—satisfying but forgettable. My twin daughters agree. When a Swift track seeps out of SiriusXM Coffee House, we sigh in unison and silently wish it were SZA.

  • The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

    The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

    Last night, I dreamed I retired too early, lost my tenure, and found myself cobbling together two humiliating jobs to survive. By day I was a part-time writing instructor, hustling between second-rate colleges. By night I was reduced to a takeout delivery boy for the sandwich shop where my wife cheerfully worked.

    If there was a silver lining, it was this: while waiting for her to assign me deliveries, I could pedal furiously on a stable of exercise bikes provided by the restaurant. Because, naturally, this wasn’t just a sandwich joint — it was part health club, part tourist mecca. At one point, a gaggle of Danish tourists descended, cackling in a booth for hours, treating the sandwich shop as though it were the Eiffel Tower of their itinerary.

    My wife flourished. She collaborated with the shop’s original owners, a warm couple from Hong Kong, brainstorming new sandwiches and ambitious upgrades, while I sweated like a condemned man on the bikes. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon: a dark brown leather jacket with supernatural properties. Each time I donned it before a delivery, every bead of sweat, every impurity, vanished as though I’d been baptized anew.

    But there was more. To scrape together a living, I also moonlighted in a third job — mysterious manual labor in a basement with a nameless partner. To reach this purgatory, I rode a bus into the “forbidden city,” a nightmare realm painted in muted oranges, where the architecture sulked in jagged, miserable shapes and its citizens were shackled to endless toil. It was a geometry lesson in despair.

    I was heartsick, regretting my decision to retire early. Only when the bus carried me back to the sandwich shop did relief arrive. There, I could mingle with long-lost friends and international tourists, ride the exercise bikes, and cling to the reassuring thought that my leather jacket would always purge me of sweat and shame.

  • The Pea Protein Plague

    The Pea Protein Plague

    For three days, I flirted with the fantasy of going vegan in the protein department. Out went my dependable whey; in came Orgain’s peanut butter-flavored vegan powder ($32), built on the gritty backbone of pea protein. Waiting in the wings was OWYN Pro Elite in dark chocolate ($47), still sealed, still smug.

    But curiosity didn’t last. It curdled into resolve — the kind of resolve born from three days of gut-twisting cramps so vicious they stole my ability to work out. Imagine the irony: my protein obsession, meant to fuel training, knocked me out of the gym entirely. Not just any protein, but vegan protein, embraced in part to end my petty larceny of cow’s milk from calves. My humanitarian mission dissolved in a haze of bloating and despair.

    So I texted my neighbor Holly, handed over $80 of organic powders, and felt as if I were banishing demons. She was delighted. Her family loves vegan protein powder for their smoothies. I was both exorcised and relieved. Good riddance to powders that turned my insides into a war zone.

    Looking forward, I’ll still be a thief — but only a petty one. A scoop of whey stirred into my morning buckwheat groats. Two modest helpings of plain Greek yogurt with honey at lunch and after my nap. A splash of stolen milk here and there. I hope the calves understand: my theft is not egregious, just survivable.

    Still, my diet is 90 percent plants, enough to keep my conscience propped up. My protein intake will slide from 180 grams to about 140, and so be it. I’ll trade hypertrophy for digestive peace.

    Because let me say it clearly: some of us must never touch pea protein again. It expands inside us like an alien organism, leaving us to wish for death’s consoling embrace. Never again.

  • When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    The documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) are searing indictments as much as they are testaments to survival. They tell the story of a singular city—New Orleans, a cultural jewel—betrayed and abandoned by its own nation.

    Told through the voices of those who endured the storm in 2005, these films lay bare a fourfold sin against the people of New Orleans.

    First sin: red-lining. Decades of discriminatory housing policies corralled Black families into neighborhoods below sea level—neighborhoods left exposed to catastrophe—while white families secured higher, safer ground. Yet out of this coerced geography bloomed community, kinship, jazz, art, and a way of life so distinctive that New Orleans became not just a city but a state of mind.

    Second sin: neglect. The protective marshlands were carved away, the levees shoddily built, the safeguards ignored. What should have been natural resilience was dismantled piece by piece, until a storm became a man-made massacre.

    Third sin: abandonment. When the waters rose, thousands of citizens waited for rescue that never came. They suffered hunger, thirst, illness, despair. Bureaucracies paralyzed by incompetence and poisoned by political rivalry left them stranded—leaders too intent on humiliating one another to save lives.

    Fourth sin: defamation. Media outlets, infected with racism, painted Black survivors as looters and criminals while white survivors were depicted as resourceful and brave. Rumors of sniper fire and marauding gangs turned aid missions into militarized standoffs, with the National Guard pointing rifles at the very people they were sent to save. These lies fueled white vigilantes who hunted Black residents as if the collapse of law gave them license to kill.

    This fourfold betrayal is almost unbearable to watch, yet threaded through the grief is a resilient beauty: the music, the food, the language, the humor, the love of place that make New Orleans irreducible. Katrina remains one of America’s most shameful chapters—but also a reminder that the soul of New Orleans is larger than its wounds.

  • The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    The Lobster That Lifted Kettlebells

    Last night, I slipped into a dream where I was less man and more detective cliché: trench coat, team at my side, the whole noir package. We prowled the tiled underworld of a health club, where women lay dead in the shower stalls. The air carried a rank perfume—pungent, briny, unmistakable. It was the signature of our quarry, The Alligator Man, a serial killer who apparently marinated in fish guts before slaughter.

    Our trap was absurd but effective. We laced another health club’s showers with his own scent, as if baiting him with eau de swamp monster. Sure enough, the predator slithered into the stall, and I lunged. But instead of the hulking brute I expected, I clutched a young, handsome man, small enough to vanish in a crowd. His boyish face said innocent; his stench said otherwise. I locked eyes with him and announced, with grim satisfaction, that he was evil—and that evil was about to rot in a cell forever.

    Then, with dream logic’s usual whiplash, I found myself at a holiday party with my family. My wife had crafted me a lobster costume: claws for hands, a scarlet exoskeleton, and a hat shaped like a boiled crustacean’s head. I looked like a seafood platter at a masquerade ball. I ate cake while dodging feline landmines—the hosts’ cats had redecorated the house with cat mess. The carpet was stained with these “accidents.” With cake fork in hand, I declared this exhibit A for my lifelong “no pets policy.”

    The party oozed past midnight into the pale gray of morning. Bored stiff and craving endorphins, I trudged home. Still zipped inside my lobster suit, I cranked up a kettlebell workout in the living room. My claws clacked as I swung iron, the sweat pooling beneath my polyester shellfish skin.

    Headlights swept across the window. My wife and twin daughters walked in. I assumed they, too, had abandoned the litter-box bacchanal. She spotted me mid-squat, lobster claws snapping, and didn’t so much as flinch. I worried she’d rage over my soaking her handmade costume in salt and sweat. Instead, she simply yawned, brushed past my lobster theatrics, and announced she was going to bed. Evil had been vanquished, cats had soiled carpets, and the lobster workout was apparently just another Tuesday in her world.

  • From Watch Nirvana to Strap Hell and Back Again (a Short Story)

    From Watch Nirvana to Strap Hell and Back Again (a Short Story)

    I’m nearing sixty-four, and you’d think the resume of my life would say it all: married man, father of twin teenage daughters, lifelong weightlifter, and full-time college writing instructor pushing four decades in the trenches. Yet none of those titles define me quite like the pathology that has consumed my last twenty years: an obsession with diver watches.

    The disease began in 2005, when I bought my first “Hero Watch,” a Citizen Ecozilla. I was a suburbanite with all the aquatic daring of a backyard kiddie pool, but strapping that hulk of steel on my wrist turned me into a fantasy adventurer. The Ecozilla was my passport into adventurist cosplay, proof that even if my only dive was into Costco’s frozen food aisle, I could still play Jacques Cousteau in my imagination.

    For nearly two decades, I clung to bracelets and dismissed rubber. Rubber straps were sticky, sweaty, and cheap—the footwear of wristwear. But then, in 2024, a fellow enthusiast on Instagram whispered the gospel of Minotaur, a boutique strap company out of Houston. Their FKM rubber was no ordinary rubber—it was luxury-grade, accordion-style, fat spring bar holes, the kind of strap that doesn’t just hold a watch but weds it. Think craft brewery meets haute horology.

    When I slipped a Minotaur onto my Seiko diver, it was a conversion experience. Think Paul in Damascus. The strap was supple yet firm, sleek yet rugged. It was the hand-in-glove perfection every watch collector secretly craves.

    Suddenly, my seven Seiko divers weren’t just watches—they were sacraments. I no longer needed to fuss with bracelet links or endure the daily annoyance of micro-adjustments. The Minotaur straps brought equilibrium to my collection, and by extension, to my life.

    I became the town crier of Minotaur. Instagram posts, YouTube videos, flowery effusions of praise—my strap evangelism knew no bounds.

    I even struck up a friendship with Ron Minitrie, the Minotaur founder himself, who sent me models to showcase. For a while, I was living the influencer’s dream: watch bliss, strap perfection, hobby fulfillment so complete I worried it might be dangerous.

    But what happens when you reach nirvana? Do you close the YouTube channel, ride off into the sunset, and live happily ever after? Of course not. That’s when the gods get bored and send you a curse.

    The curse arrived in the form of a comment from a viewer named Infiniti-88. He linked to a Notre Dame study that accused FKM rubber straps of being Trojan horses of doom. According to the study, FKM bled PFAS “forever chemicals” into the bloodstream, potentially wrecking organs, scrambling hormones, and sowing cancer. Because watch straps are worn all day—sweat, heat, friction, even while sleeping—the risk was presented as constant exposure.

    Infiniti-88’s question was simple: “What are you going to do?”

    Cue the descent into madness. I read the study, panicked, and stripped all my Minotaur straps, replacing them with silicone and vulcanized rubber. Immediately, my watches felt diminished, like Ferraris stuck on snow tires. They lost their soul.

    I made a YouTube confessional and discussed the finer points of the Notre Dame Study. Half the viewers thanked me for raising the alarm; the other half mocked me for peddling paranoia. They insisted FKM risk was bottom-tier, a blip in the PFAS risk hierarchy. My response? Oscillation. I switched from Minotaur to silicone and back again—sometimes eight times in a single day. I was a man possessed, toggling straps like a lab rat on amphetamines.

    Desperate for clarity, I appealed to the digital oracles: Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT. Their verdict was unanimous: the study was flawed. The researchers had tortured the straps—soaked them in solvents, scorched them with heat, abraded them into pulp. In short, conditions no wristwatch strap would ever endure on a human arm. The Minotaur straps, they said, were stable, inert, safe.

    I breathed relief. For about three minutes. Then paranoia struck again. Were the AI platforms telling me the truth, or, as the dutiful sycophants they are, just feeding me the reassurance I craved? Was I clinging to wishful thinking dressed up as “analysis”?

    Meanwhile, fellow watch obsessives chimed in from YouTube and Instagram, their chorus split evenly between “Don’t worry” and “Panic with me.” Their voices joined the cacophony in my head. Certainty dissolved. Once you’ve pictured poison seeping into your wrist, you can’t unsee it.

    I began to hate the hobby itself. Hate the straps, hate the watches, hate the endless cycle of worry. It wasn’t about horology anymore—it was about risk management as a form of neurosis. I even considered selling everything and defecting to Tudor, whose bracelets come with the T-fit clasp–a miracle of quick adjustment that eliminates the fuss of links and tools. No chemicals, no rubber, no paranoia. Just a slide-and-click mechanism that promises freedom from my madness.

    When I think of my complicated relationship with Minotaur straps, the potentially-flawed Notre Dame Study, the fear of forever chemicals, and thoughts of a T-fit clasp, an image comes to mind that defines the insanity of my current situation:

    I’m thinking of the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

    In Moria, Gandalf confronts the Balrog on the Bridge of Khazad-dûm. They fall together into the abyss, and after an epic battle that spans mountains and caverns, Gandalf is mortally spent. It’s not a literal tail piercing—Tolkien describes Gandalf being dragged down by the Balrog’s whip after he breaks the bridge. The trauma of the battle kills him in his “Gandalf the Grey” form, but he is later sent back, transfigured, as Gandalf the White.

    Gandalf is never the same again, not because of the wound, but because his role changes: he comes back more powerful, more detached from the mortal world, and closer to a messenger of the divine.

    If I’m to survive my Minotaur strap crisis, I must follow the trajectory of Gandalf : I have to let the old self fall into the abyss. Like Gandalf, I must die to the madness and come back reborn, detached, stronger, armed with perspective. Because at this point, it’s not just about straps. It’s about what kind of man I am when the watch box stares back at me.