Cinemorphosis

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  • What If the Cranky Old Man on the Lawn Has a Point?

    What If the Cranky Old Man on the Lawn Has a Point?

    I’ve kept in touch with one of my former colleagues who retired from the college where she taught French for thirty years. She is close to eighty now. She told me she was already starting to feel a lack of engagement in her classroom at the end of her teaching days in 2016. Even though phones had to be turned to silent and be stowed away during class, she felt that the kids were just waiting until class was over to get back to their phones and social media. Their brains had changed, their attention spans had been truncated, and they needed to be constantly entertained.

    “Edutainment” was already influencing the way we teach, but the situation grew worse. Now, the addiction to screens has sucked the students into a black hole. Without their phones, they are detached, disengaged, and sullen. 

    It is a cliche that old people are annoying as hell because they are prone to reminisce about a golden age while lecturing the modern world for its recently acquired pathologies. They wax nostalgic for some mythical past that was full of grotesque prejudices, ignorance, and chicanery. To be a scold telling the world that you came from a better place is to be a pompous ass and a bore. I will concede all of that. But objectively speaking as someone who has taught over five decades, I can say there was a Before Times when life in the analog world wasn’t in competition with the digital world. Objectively speaking, something gets lost when we vacillate between the analog and the digital worlds. Public intellectuals such as Sam Harris and Jaron Lanier have made it clear that the digital landscape has become about commerce, addiction, loss of privacy, surveillance, fragmentation, and outrage. In other words, the Internet has had dehumanizing effects on us. 

    Parents who saw their children lying in bed scrolling over TikTok videos during the pandemic can tell you their children have been damaged, and that nothing makes them happier than to see their children hanging out with other kids–without their phones–and hanging out at the park, playing sports, taking walks at the beach, and finding respite from their screen existence. Parents wept with relief. 

    I enjoyed my youth without screens and curating my life on social media. Every summer between 1975 and 1979 when I was a high school teen, my family and ten other families and friends made the sojourn to Pt. Reyes Beach where the Johnson’s Oyster farm provided us with what seemed like bottomless truck beds of oysters. From noon to sunset, hundreds of us ate an infinite amount of barbecued oysters served with garlic butter and Tabasco sauce, thousands of loaves of garlic bread, and colossal slices of moist chocolate cake. Ignoring warnings of nearby great white shark sightings, we’d punctuate our feasting with forays into the waves before emerging from the ocean. Our muscular pecs shiny with rivulets of salt water, we returned to the picnic tables and had another serving of barbecued oysters. In the summer of 78, I opted to have my parents drive home without me. I got a ride home in the back of a truck with a bunch of random people I had met that day. Full from a day of feasting and feeling like King Neptune, we stared into the stars with our glazed lizard eyes and entertained each other with crazy stories. We had a healthy disregard for chronicling our experiences on social media, for monitoring the enormous food we consumed, and for time itself. Those were happy days indeed and pointed to an era gone and lost forever. 

    I would not have had that memory had I lived such a life with a smartphone. My memories would have been filtered through a prism of digital curation and a rewired brain that needs to filter my experience in such a way. We don’t grasp the depth of our brain’s rewiring because, like fish, we don’t know we are wet when all we know is the ocean around us. We have been rewired for this new oceanic environment.

    The screen has rewired the brains of young people. They don’t read. Many college instructors don’t assign books, or if they do, the books are on the short side. In the place of books, instructors assign short essays. When it comes to writing assignments, some high schools and colleges don’t assign essays anymore. They have the students hand-write paragraphs in class. 

    Of course, as you get older, you don’t want to be a bore and lecture the world on the way things were during Before Times. At the same time, if you taught in the 1980s to the 2020s and have seen the way technology has affected the human brain, self-esteem, addiction, reading comprehension, and critical thinking skills, you may have a lot to offer by contrasting the Screen Brain with the Pre-Screen Brain. You can can write academic books about this subject full of graphs and statistics, or you can give anecdotal narrative accounts, or some combination of the two, but it would be absurd to keep your mouth shut because you feared being reduced to the grumpy old person on the lawn arms akimbo screaming that the world is going to hell. Better to risk sounding like a crank than to watch silently as an entire generation scroll itself into oblivion.

  • Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    During the Fall Semester of 2024, the English Department had one of those “brown bag” sessions—an optional gathering where instructors actually show up because the topic is like a flashing red light on the education highway. This particular crisis-in-the-making? AI. Would writing tools that millions were embracing at exponential speed render our job obsolete? The room was packed with nervous, coffee-chugging professors, myself included, all bracing for a Pandora’s box of AI-fueled dilemmas. They tossed scenario after scenario at us, and the existential angst was palpable.

    First up: What do you do when a foreign language student submits an essay written in their native tongue, then let’s play translator? Is it cheating? Does the term “English Department” even make sense anymore when our Los Angeles campus sounds like a United Nations general assembly? Are we teaching “English,” or are we, more accurately, teaching “the writing process” to people of many languages with AI now tagging along as a co-author?

    Next came the AI Tsunami, a term we all seemed to embrace with a mix of dread and resignation. What do we do when we’ve reached the point that 90% of the essays we receive are peppered with AI speak so robotic it sounds like Siri decided to write a term paper? We were all skeptical about AI detectors—about as reliable as a fortune teller reading tea leaves. I shared my go-to strategy: Instead of accusing a student of cheating (because who has time for that drama?), I simply leave a comment, dripping with professional distaste: “Your essay reeks of AI-generated pablum. I’m giving it a D because I cannot, in good conscience, grade this higher. If you’d like to rewrite it with actual human effort, be my guest.” The room nodded in approval.

    But here’s the thing: The real existential crisis hit when we realized that the hardworking, honest students are busting their butts for B’s, while the tech-savvy slackers are gaming the system, walking away with A’s by running their bland prose through the AI carwash. The room buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and surrender—because let’s be honest, at least the grammar and spelling errors are nearly extinct.

    Our dean, ever the Zen master in a room full of jittery academics, calmly suggested that maybe—just maybe—we should incorporate personal reflection into our assignments. His idea? By having students spill a bit of their authentic thoughts onto the page, we could then compare those raw musings to their more polished, suspect, possibly ChatGPT-assisted essays. A clever idea. It’s harder to fake authenticity than to parrot a thesis on The Great Gatsby.

    I nodded thoughtfully, though with a rising sense of dread. How exactly was I supposed to integrate “personal reflections” into a syllabus built around the holy trinity of argumentation, counterarguments, and research? I teach composition and critical thinking, not a creative writing seminar for tortured souls. My job isn’t to sift through essays about existential crises or romantic disasters disguised as epiphanies. It’s to teach students how to build a coherent argument and take down a counterpoint without resorting to tired platitudes. Reflection has its place—but preferably somewhere far from my grading pile.

    Still, I had to admit the dean was on to something. If I didn’t get ahead of this, I’d end up buried under an avalanche of soul-searching essays that somehow all lead to a revelation about “balance in life.” I needed time to mull this over, to figure out how personal writing could serve my course objectives without turning it into group therapy on paper.

    But before I could even start strategizing, the Brown Bag session was over. I gathered my notes, bracing myself for the inevitable flood of “personal growth narratives” waiting for me next semester. 

    As I walked out of that meeting, I had a new writing prompt simmering in my head for my students: “Write an argumentative essay exploring how AI platforms like ChatGPT will reshape education. Project how these technologies might be used in the future and consider the ethical lines that AI use blurs. Should we embrace AI as a tool, or do we need hard rules to curb its misuse? Address academic integrity, critical thinking, and whether AI widens or narrows the education gap.”

    When I got home later that day, in a fit of efficiency, I stuffed my car with a mountain of e-waste—ancient laptops, decrepit tablets, and cell phones that could double as paperweights—and headed to the City of Torrance E-Waste Drive. The line of cars stretched for what seemed like miles, all of us dutifully purging our electronic skeletons to make room for the latest AI-compatible toys. As I waited, I tuned into a podcast with Mark Cuban chatting with Bill Maher, and Cuban was adamant: AI will never be regulated because it’s America’s golden goose for global dominance. And there I was, sitting in a snaking line of vehicles, all of us unwitting soldiers in the tech wars, dumping our outdated gadgets like a 21st-century arms race.

    As I edged closer to the dumpster, I imagined ripping open my shirt to reveal a Captain America emblem beneath, fully embracing the ridiculousness of it all. This wasn’t just teaching anymore—it was a revolution. And if I was going to lead it, I’d need to be like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, armed with the Tablets of AI Laws. Without these laws, I’d be as helpless as a fish flopping on a dry riverbank. To face the coming storm unprepared wasn’t just unwise; it was professional malpractice. My survival depended on it.

    I thought I had outsmarted AI, like some literary Rambo armed with signal phrases, textual analysis, and in-text citations as my guerrilla tactics. ChatGPT couldn’t handle that level of academic sophistication, right? Wrong. One month later, the machine rolled up offering full signal phrase service like some overachieving valet at the Essay Ritz. That defense crumbled faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel.

    Okay, I thought, I’ll outmaneuver it with source currency. ChatGPT didn’t do recent articles—perfect! I’d make my students cite cutting-edge research. Surely, that would stump the AI. Nope. Faster than you can say “breaking news,” ChatGPT was pulling up the latest articles like a know-it-all librarian with Wi-Fi in their brain.

    Every time I tried to pin it down, the AI just flexed and swelled, like some mutant Hulk fed on electricity and hubris. I was the noble natural bodybuilder, forged by sweat, discipline, and oceans of egg whites. ChatGPT? It was the juiced-up monster, marinated in digital steroids and algorithmic growth hormones. I’d strain to add ten pounds to my academic bench press; ChatGPT would casually slap on 500 and knock out reps while checking its reflection. I was a relic frozen on the dais, oil-slicked and flexing, while the AI steamrolled past me in the race for writing dominance.

    That’s when the obvious landed like a kettlebell on my chest: I wasn’t going to beat ChatGPT. It wasn’t a bug to patch or a fad to outlast—it was an evolutionary leap, a quantum steroid shot to the act of writing itself. So I stopped swinging at it. Instead, I strapped a saddle on the beast and started steering, learning to use its brute force as my tool instead of my rival.

    It reminded me of a childhood cartoon about Paul Bunyan, the original muscle god with an axe the size of a telephone pole. Then came the chainsaw. There was a contest: man versus machine. Paul roared and hacked, but the chainsaw shredded the forest into submission. The crowd went home knowing the age of the axe was dead. Likewise, the sprawling forest of language has a new lumberjack—and I look pathetic trying to keep up, like a guy standing on Hawthorne Boulevard with a toothbrush, vowing to scrub clean every city block from Lawndale to Palos Verdes.

  • David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    David Letterman Killed Disco, But Can He Save My Class?

    In one fell swoop, David Letterman killed disco. Not just the music, but the entire polyester empire of rhinestone smarm and sweat-drenched earnestness. Letterman wasn’t seduced by mirror balls. He walked on stage with his arctic deadpan, and with irony as his weapon, executed disco in front of a live studio audience.

    I was just starting college then—a lifelong bodybuilder and Olympic weightlifter who could hoist a barbell but couldn’t hoist a personality. Muscles, yes. Presence, no.

    I didn’t just want to be David Letterman. I wanted to graft his sardonic detachment onto the icy brilliance of Vladimir Nabokov—a cocktail of late-night sarcasm and literary menace. I didn’t know what I wanted to be, exactly, only that it had to involve confidence, storytelling, performance—something that allowed me to “give a presentation.”

    By accident, I stumbled into teaching. In 1987, the chancellor of Humanities at Merritt College launched a pilot program to deliver classes at Skyline High School in Oakland, and none of the full-time faculty wanted the job. My neighbor, Felix Elizalde, whose kids went to school with me, threw me a lifeline. One gig snowballed into another, and soon I was a full-time college writing instructor.

    That was thirty-eight years ago. For most of them, I would have told you the hardest part of the job was grading essays—an endless swamp of half-baked theses and misplaced commas. But now, in 2025, grading essays is only the second hardest task. The first? Something educators and administrators alike love to call “student engagement.”

    I don’t know if it’s the black hole of smartphones or the simple math of age—I’m nearly forty-five years older than my students. Probably both. Either way, I can no longer stand in front of a classroom, channel my inner Letterman, and spin stories until the room vibrates with attention. Instead, I stand beside a giant screen plastered with Google Slides. My students are “visual learners,” raised on swipes and emojis.

    I could go back to the Letterman Method, earn some laughs, maybe even spike engagement for a few minutes. But at what cost? The Google Slides aren’t as funny as my comedy routine, but they do hit the sacred “core concepts” and “Student Learning Outcomes.”

    I’ve become a ghost haunting the pedagogy manuals. Occasionally I slip, crack a joke, earn some chuckles, channel my younger self—but then I reel myself back in, because the templates for counterarguments and rebuttals won’t teach themselves.

    The students aren’t fooled. A few of the candid ones smirk: “Don’t worry, McMahon, ChatGPT will do it for us.”

    And so, as I enter my mid-sixties, I keep trying to stay aligned with the modern world. Yet every step forward feels like five steps backward, as if I’m not teaching writing anymore but rehearsing my own obsolescence.

  • The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Old-Age Desperation

    The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Old-Age Desperation

    In July of 2025, I had dinner at The Kebab Shop with an old friend—a former boxing champion turned engineer, the kind of guy who looks like he could build a bridge in the morning and break your nose that afternoon, all while discussing Tolstoy.

    He is a former student, thirty years younger than I am, and at a completely different phase in his life. As we at our kebabs, he told me he had broken up with his girlfriend and confessed something strange and honest:

    “I feel like I’m chasing the sad,” he said. “Just so I’ll feel better about myself.”

    I told him not to worry—sadness would find him, bite him in the ass, and tell him to die. It was just a matter of time. . Sometimes pain is too large to register. Like being so exhausted you can’t fall asleep, or so depleted you can’t even feel tired.
    He nodded, then casually dropped the bomb: he just bought a Lexus. I assumed an SUV—some respectable adult-mobile with storage. Nope. He turned his phone toward me and grinned. It was an obsidian black Lexus RC350 coupe, a low-slung, 311-horsepower statement of rebellion against mediocrity and middle age. Price tag? A cool $70,000.

    Why? Because he gets bored. Easily. He’s cursed with a mind that needs friction. His current job is too easy, and when things get too easy, life feels mechanical. He’s planning to move on—to another job, another city, more challenge, more money, more meaning.
    He told me staying home to watch TV feels like soul rot. So instead, he journals (in a real book, with prompts—who knew that was a thing?), plays soccer on weekends, and takes private dance lessons. Yes, dance. This man has better time management than most monasteries.

    I told him I admire him. I mean it. He’s not surrendering to entropy; he’s interrogating it with pen, ball, and motion. He’s writing his way out of the void. I might need to follow his lead when I retire in two years. No matter our age, we either rage our fists at mortality or we start sinking into the upholstery.

    I then told my friend that I nearly bought a $2,000 recliner last week. A magnificent beast of engineered comfort. But the moment I imagined myself melting into it, day after day, I envisioned not rest—but early burial. A leather sarcophagus with cupholders. I backed away like it was a cursed object.

    I was inspired by my friend’s hunger for adventure, so the next morning I punished myself with a new exercise: the Farmer’s Carry–two kettlebells, one in each hand, pacing in circles across my front lawn like a rogue warlord in gym shorts. Neighbors peeked through their blinds to watch this 63-year-old Larry Csonka doppelgänger lumbering across the grass like I was either training for something… or losing a very public battle with aging.

    I get the sense that my neighbors pity me. Here is a man who can’t let go of his bodybuilding years. He is so desperate he is going to kill himself. I imagine their fingers are poised over their phones, ready to dial 911. 

    The exercise nearly broke me. I’ll keep it in rotation, but with moderation. I train to feel alive, not to hemorrhage my last remaining Life Force into the turf of suburban California.

    And now, I wait for my friend to pull up and take me for a ride in his Lexus. He’s earned it. The man’s been driving the same Corolla for thirteen years. Now it’s his turn to live a little. And me? I’ll tag along, a passenger for a while, enjoying the ride through this strange, accelerating cycle of life.

  • Speedos at Sunset

    Speedos at Sunset

    The New York Times article, titled “Skimpy Men’s Swimming Briefs Are Making a Splash,” offers a solemn dispatch from the front lines of GLP-1 drugs, but I would guess that men—having exhausted every form of visible self-optimization—are now expressing their Ozempic-enabled slenderness via tiny, Lycra-clad declarations of status. We’re talking male bikinis, or what I like to call the ego sling.

    Apparently, if you’re dropping $18,000 a year to chemically suppress your appetite and shed your humanity one subcutaneous injection at a time, you deserve the privilege of looking like a Bond villain’s pool boy. I suppose this is the endgame: pay to waste away, then wrap what’s left in a luxury logoed banana peel.

    Luxury underwear companies, never ones to miss a chance to monetize body dysmorphia, are now marketing these second-skin briefs not as mere swimwear, but as power statements. To wear them is to say: “I’ve defeated fat, joy, modesty, and comfort in one fell swoop.”

    I’m almost 64. My aspirations remain high—ideally, I’d like to look like a special-ops operator on vacation in Sardinia. But I know my place. I wear boxer-style swim trunks, the cloth of the pragmatic and the semi-dignified. They’re not exciting, but neither is seeing a sun-leathered septuagenarian adjust a spandex slingshot over a suspicious tan line.

    There’s a difference between being aspirational and being delusional. The former means striving for vitality, strength, and energy. The latter means stuffing yourself into a satirical undergarment and pretending you’re a twenty-two-year-old wide receiver with a sponsorship deal.

    To my fellow older men: sculpt your body like it’s your spiritual obligation—but when it comes to swim briefs the size of a hotel mint, maybe opt out. Not every part of youth is worth reliving. 

    When I think of old guys clinging to their youth by wearing undersized swim trunks, I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were in Maui and I was treated to one of life’s great grotesques: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading the beach in dark-blue Speedos with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. She was Mediterranean gorgeous, twenty-something, and clearly imported as the ultimate accessory. He was trim, shaved, strutting across the sand like a hedge-fund satyr who believed that constant motion kept the Grim Reaper wheezing in his wake. He dove into the surf not like a man swimming, but like a man negotiating—bargaining with Time.

    You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air. A CEO, no doubt—half his life in boardrooms, the other half clawing at immortality. His creed was Hefner’s: work hard, play harder, and Botox anything that betrays the passage of time. I’m not here to moralize about his May-December arrangement. What fascinated me was the fantasy: money, discipline, and a bit of manscaping as talismans against entropy, as if youth could be distilled into a cologne.

    But the tableau reeked of mismatch—two puzzle pieces jammed together with superglue. Forced smiles, awkward touches: every moment chipped another sliver from the illusion until they looked less like lovers and more like hostages. This was not youth preserved; this was youth taxidermied. His confidence read as terror. His curated life, meant to inspire envy, collapsed into a sad performance—a tuxedo on a traffic cone.

    He reminded me of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted: born in Ecuador in ’62, raised in Toronto, obsessed with bodybuilding, crime, and women. He had it all—the Rolex Daytona, gold chains, sunglasses so huge they had their own weather system. Then came prison and deportation. Now in his sixties, Ferraro is a sculpted parody: sport coat draped like a cape, tight black jeans, hipster boots, eyes full of melancholy. He wants his life back, but he knows the casino is closed. Like the Speedo satyr, Ferraro can’t stop looking back, calcifying into a monument of salt.

    And salt is the right metaphor: Lot’s wife glancing back until she froze mid-regret. Neither Ferraro nor Speedo Man could let go of their “youth identities.” Without them, death feels too close. With them, they look embalmed while still breathing.

    I understand how hard it is to let go of the life you think you deserve. Spend a week in Hawaii, and you step into a parallel universe—Sacred Time. You board a $400-million jet, dehydrate for five hours, and land convinced you’re immortal. Within 24 hours you’re marinating in mai tais, demolishing lilikoi pies, and basking under sunsets scripted by God to flatter your ego. Clocks stop. Deadlines vanish. Sacred Time whispers: Death can’t find you here.

    Which is why leaving Hawaii feels like a cosmic eviction notice. You board the plane and return not just to California but to Profane Time, where bills, emails, and mortality resume their tyranny. For weeks after, you’re sun-drunk and disoriented, still hearing waves in your ears while the neighbor’s leaf blower revs like a dentist drill. Sacred Time is an opiate; reentry is cold turkey.

    Nostalgia is the next fix. For me, it’s the summer of 1977 at Don Castro Swim Lagoon. I was fifteen—half-boy, half-bicep—sunbathing like a pagan sacrifice to the gods of narcissism, The Happy Hooker hidden in my gym bag, my skin baptized in banana-scented cocoa butter. That lagoon was my Eden: the girls in bikinis, the musk of suntan oil, the hormone haze of adolescence. That era hardwired me to believe pleasure was a birthright.

    But nostalgia curdles. Today I’m older, paler, a few Adonis fragments left in the rearview. What once felt like a creed now feels like a rerun of Fantasy Island with bad lighting. The boy in me still demands his sunlit altar, but now he feels like a squatter. Am I still bronzing in Eden—or am I frozen in salt, looking back too long at a self that no longer exists?

    Enter the “Return to the Womb.” Aging produces this primal regression: a desire not just for beaches, but for obliteration of responsibility. For me, it smells like Florida—the state of my birth, equal parts Eden and punchline. Mango air, coconut breezes, sultry rain: a fetal simulation with Wi-Fi. But even I know it’s not vitality; it’s paralysis. It’s not Life Force—it’s brain rot in Tommy Bahama.

    During lockdown, I tasted this desire to return to the womb. Pajamas at noon, Zillow scrolling barrier islands, buckwheat groats as immortality. My body synced with the rhythm of a hot tub. I didn’t want to emerge. I still don’t. Which terrifies me—because Father Time is no cuddly mascot. He’s a cosmic accountant, and he wants receipts. What did you do with your time?

    Meanwhile, I’m bicep-curling nostalgia like it’s protein powder. For five years, I hounded my wife about Florida. She countered with Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages. Watching geriatric Parrotheads do water ballet to Neil Sedaka was enough to kill the fantasy. It wasn’t Eden—it was a gulag of shuffleboard and scheduled fun. Leisure not as freedom, but as occupation.

    The film’s standout was Dennis Dean, an octogenarian grifter prowling bingo halls for rich widows. Watching him lie catatonic under a ceiling fan after another failed con, I realized my wife had played me like a Stradivarius. My Florida obsession died in that moment.

    So now I’ve scaled back. No more eternal-Adonis-in-the-tropics delusions. No Speedos. Just a week vacation in Maui or Miami, then back to Profane Time with my Costco protein powder and kettlebells. Still chasing immortality—but with at least a fig leaf of self-awareness.

  • His Last Words: “Too Much Trouble”

    His Last Words: “Too Much Trouble”

    No one wants the following carved into their headstone:
    “He really liked convenience.”
    Or:
    “He really knew how to wind down after a long day.”
    Or the ultimate in mediocrity:
    “He was quite the expert at calmly not answering the door when strangers knocked.”

    Yet I can’t lie—those epitaphs could summarize me with cruel efficiency. I should be ashamed. If the highlight reel of my life is craving convenience and dodging conflict, then I’m a sloth, a coward, and a comfort-zone junkie. Guilty as charged.

    Of course, apologists for my particular brand of laziness will insist there’s wisdom in centering life on convenience: you save time, conserve resources, and maximize efficiency. But let’s not kid ourselves. “Optimization” is just a euphemism for avoiding reality. And then come the even shinier euphemisms: “life hacks.” If all you’ve done is engineer a way to dodge effort, that’s not a hack—it’s a confession.

    Not that every convenience is unworthy. I won’t step foot in a gym: too expensive, too crowded, too germy, and far too drenched in bad pop music. I prefer my garage—cheap iron, good podcasts, and zero chance of catching COVID off the lat pulldown machine. That’s not clever; it’s survival.

    Same with my diet: when I’m home alone, dinner is steel-cut oats or buckwheat groats with protein powder and soy milk. It’s not innovation; it’s five minutes of apathy in a bowl. To call it a “hack” would be grandiose.

    The pandemic hardened this streak. Three-fourths of my classes went online in 2020, and they’ve never returned to campus. Everything lives on Canvas now. I barely drive 3,000 miles a year. Efficiency became narcotic. Once you’ve tasted it, going back to inefficiency feels like shoving rocks in your shoes for nostalgia’s sake.

    Even my piano habit has become infected. Cecil, my seventy-eight-year-old tuner, has warned me: when he’s gone, so is my piano’s soul. Skilled tuners are rare. My solution? Buy an electric keyboard. Sure, the sound won’t have the magical sound of my acoustic Yamaha, but it’ll move easily from room to room and never need Cecil. Convenience conquers music too.

    I’m also a poor excuse for a parent in the Uber era. Driving my teen daughters to football games, birthday parties, and amusement parks feels like sacrilege to my convenience creed. Honestly, if I were truly committed to convenience, I never would’ve had children. Or cats. Litter boxes, flea treatments, vet visits—each one an affront to my principles of time-saving and efficiency.

    Convenience can metastasize into pathology. Violations of my “policies” breed resentment. Aging itself infuriates me because it’s inconvenient. Doctor appointments and funerals snarl my schedule. Death doesn’t just terrify; it inconveniences.

    Routine is the bride to the groom of convenience, and together they dominate. 

    Even my relationship to religion is seen through the lens of convenience. I wish I could slam the door on doubt and join the ranks of militant atheists—or zealous believers. Either extreme would be neat, clean, convenient. Instead, I’m stuck in agnostic purgatory, forced to read philosopher Elizabeth Anderson’s critiques of scripture, Saint Paul, and every thinker in between. Anderson reduces morality to evolution; Paul calls us fractured, fallen souls, a mirror I dislike but recognize. I want a bow on the present of certainty, but instead, I get the knot of doubt.

    Jesus, of course, preached a gospel of uncompromising inconvenience. His very life was a rebuke to comfort. Following him means picking up a cross, not a La-Z-Boy. For disciples of the gospel of ease, his way is impossible—requiring nothing less than a Damascus-level conversion to set a new course.

    When I think of convenience, I think of Chris Grossman, my co-worker at a Berkeley wine shop in the 1980s. He was the store’s golden boy—popular with customers, armed with quick wit and easy charm—and utterly allergic to human entanglements. Girlfriends, he explained, weren’t worth the trouble. Not because of their flaws, but because the whole enterprise of romance reeked of inconvenience: compromise, obligation, scheduling. He lived alone, ate the same meals on repeat, and once a year drove his Triumph to Carmel for a car show. I adored him. He was my kind: a fellow monk in the Church of Convenience.

    Some of us are more diseased than others, and the infection corrodes standards. I loathe factory farming, dream of veganism, but recoil at the social cost. Every vegan I’ve spoken with admits the hardest part isn’t the kale; it’s the cold shoulder. I already wear the family badge of black sheep. If I imposed tofu bakes on my wife and daughters, I’d be ostracized. They want meat; I want peace. When I mention plant-based dinners, they shoot me a side-eye sharp enough to slice seitan. Push it further, and I can see my tenuous connection with them unravel thread by thread until exile is complete. And clawing my way back into their good graces would be the most inconvenient penance imaginable.

    I’m already a neurotic who alienates people more often than I’d like. Rebuilding broken ties is grueling work—humiliating, exhausting, inconvenient. So I stay walled up in my fortress of convenience, half-proud, half-ashamed, imagining my epitaph chiseled in granite: He preferred the easy way.

  • Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED World

    Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED World

    Two months shy of sixty-four in August of 2025, I found myself on the 405 heading north, fantasizing about writing a book on life’s last trimester. My wife (still spry at fifty), one twin daughter, and I were crawling toward Studio City for cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday. Around Westwood, the freeway collapsed into one lane of misery thanks to a construction project that looked like it was engineered by Dante himself. A trip that should have been forty-five minutes mutated into a two-hour festival of fumes and despair. Traffic isn’t just exhausting—it’s the nihilist’s victory parade, proof that “progress” and “civilization” are marketing scams.

    By the time we arrived, Pete’s lush estate felt less like Studio City and more like Sherwood Forest with valet parking. He asked how I was doing. I told him I needed a “405 Traffic Therapist” to exorcise the demons of my commute. Was there a triage tent with a cot so I could convalesce for a couple of hours and then join the party refreshed?

    The party teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the Beatles-and-Stones cover band. I admired them: financially secure but not pompous, health-conscious without being kale cultists, capable of joy in ways I’ve never mastered. When twilight came—salmon sky, ninety degrees—they stripped down and leapt into the pool like aging dolphins, while I swatted mosquitoes and sulked in long pants.

    Later, in the spacious backyard beneath the canopies, I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband—a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.

    He complimented my kettlebell regimen, and I confessed the truth: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and terror of driving after dark. He leaned in, lowered his voice, and delivered the line that should be etched on my tombstone: “The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.” 

    I countered that invisibility was merciful compared to the greater horror: we are annoying relics in a world sprinting at 5G speed. Father Time has us hardwired for lag. You can swallow kale and swing iron all you want, but in the end, you’re a Samsung with a dying processor.

    I bit into a fig, dribbled juice onto my shirt, and told Jim about my actual Samsung QLED. Four years old, picture fine, processor a fossil—menus freeze, apps load slower than a Pentium II. Samsung skimped on the chip. My fix? Upgrade to an LG OLED with a 4K AI processor that doesn’t choke when I click Netflix. The irony was obvious: I scorn Samsung for its lag while lumbering through life as a laggy processor myself. My thirty-something colleagues update effortlessly; I freeze, buffer, and curse the interface. I’m a Boomer Samsung in a Gen Z OLED world.

    Jim tried to comfort me—“You’re still funny, the students must love you”—but I waved him off. Nature documentaries have already written my script: Scar the lion rules until the young challenger rips him down, and then Scar limps off, invisible, licking his wounds. You don’t fight the arc; you nod, maybe crack a joke, then spend five grand on an OLED so you can pretend you still belong in the modern ecosystem. I looked down at the feta crumbs on my lap and muttered, “Did they forget napkins?” Meanwhile, dozens of voices rose from the pool in a raucous “Hey Jude” singalong under a moonlit salmon sky. It was a magical moment, and all I could think about was how I’d forgotten to spray myself with DEET.

  • The Geography of Friendship

    The Geography of Friendship

    I spoke today with a colleague I’ll call E, a man I’ve known for nearly three decades. In passing, I asked about D, our retired colleague, who’d always seemed to be E’s closest companion on campus. E didn’t hesitate: “Haven’t seen him since he retired four years ago.” I was floored. For thirty years I’d watched them laugh in hallways, share office gossip, and linger in each other’s doorways. To me, they were inseparable. To E, apparently, they were work buddies on a time clock. Now? His friends are his neighbors. Brutal clarity, no sentimentality.

    I didn’t judge him, though I did wince. I had mistaken their daily collisions for lifelong intimacy. What E reminded me of—casually, almost cheerfully—is the old truth: out of sight, out of mind. My ego resists this; I prefer to imagine I leave such an indelible mark that absence alone couldn’t erase me. But who am I kidding? Friendship is built on repetition and proximity, not myth. Remove the daily face-to-face, and even the warmest ties cool into background noise.

    Romantic love, of course, cheats this law. Passion bends molecules. Couples endure years of distance with letters, FaceTime, and masochistic longing. But friendship? Friendship doesn’t migrate well. It doesn’t live in the bloodstream. It lives in the cafeteria, the break room, the neighbor’s driveway. In other words, friendship needs geography. Love can survive exile; friendship needs a shared zip code.

  • Out of Alignment

    Out of Alignment

    The following is an expansion from yesterday’s short post about old age into a full-blown chapter:

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? My solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The impact probably fractured internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.

  • The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.