Cinemorphosis

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  • Don’t Let Brotoxification Ruin Your Watch Hobby

    Don’t Let Brotoxification Ruin Your Watch Hobby

    I’ve been both a watch enthusiast and a watch addict for over two decades—long enough to know the difference between a genuine passion and a performance art piece in a wrist-sized frame.

    Some of my collecting history is noble. Some of it’s embarrassing. I’ve chased watches for the right reasons: fascination with engineering, aesthetics, a deeply personal sense of style. But I’ve also chased them for the wrong reasons: hero cosplay, status projection, and the sad, sweaty hope that someone—anyone—might think I was cool for wearing a submersible chunk of steel on my wrist.

    Let’s call it what it is: I’ve bought watches to feel like a man. That instinct isn’t always authentic—it’s often a costume. And in the world of collecting, nothing poisons the well faster than performative masculinity dressed up as personal style.

    So I started trying to pare things down. Simplify. Get to the core of what I actually like, and keep a small, personal collection that reflects who I am—not who I want Instagram to think I am.

    Easier said than done.

    Because in today’s world, “authenticity” has become just another algorithmic trend, another pantomime we perform for likes and approval. The word phony doesn’t even do justice to the industrial-strength fakery we’re marinating in. It’s beyond phony. It’s Olympic-level insincerity with corporate backing and PowerPoint slides.

    We now live in a cultural ecosystem where people are so fake, their attempts at being authentic create new layers of fakery. It’s not just that they’re inauthentic—they’re meta-inauthentic. They study authenticity like it’s a language exam, and the harder they try to sound fluent, the more their accent bleeds through.

    Take, for example, the great frauds of my TV-watching youth.

    Eddie Haskell—Leave It to Beaver’s oily teenage suck-up—mastered the art of smiling at your mother while plotting your destruction behind the garage. He didn’t just imitate politeness; he weaponized it.

    Then there was Dr. Smith from Lost in Space—the preening, verbose con man who brought zero medical skills to the spaceship but still managed to insult the robot with Shakespearean flair:
    “You clumsy, colossal clod!”
    “You insidious ignoramus!”
    “You bubble-headed booby!”

    Ironically, Dr. Smith’s insults turned me on to language itself. I owe the man my English degree. Which just proves: sometimes even a fraud can inspire something real.

    Fast-forward to today’s most delicious case of catastrophic phoniness: the political operatives who realized they had alienated the male vote. After years of condescension, virtue signaling, and high-minded lectures, they finally realized men were tuning them out—if not outright recoiling.

    So what did they do?

    They flew to Half Moon Bay, checked into a luxury resort, and held a think tank retreat to rebrand masculinity. Picture it: Ivy League consultants in cashmere sweaters eating lobster rolls and sipping Pinot Noir while spitballing ways to reconnect with the “working man.” They treated young men like they were a rare species of jungle ape. Field notes were probably taken.

    This level of cluelessness isn’t just tone-deaf—it’s operatic. If the writers of Succession pitched this as a storyline, HBO would tell them to tone it down for realism.

    We need a name for this kind of oblivious, polished, self-defeating fakery. I call it Brotoxification: the act of rebranding yourself to appeal to men—but doing it with such manicured insincerity that you repel the very people you’re trying to win back.

    I work with young men every day—college football players, ex-military students, guys grinding through school because life didn’t hand them a shortcut. They don’t want coddling. They want three things: structure, discipline, and real-life skills. The last thing they need is a smug consultant in designer sneakers telling them how to “be seen.”

    And this circles back to watches.

    A few ground rules for keeping your watch hobby clean:

    1. Don’t overthink it.
    If a watch keeps whispering to you at 2 a.m., it probably belongs on your wrist. Trust your gut. You don’t need a panel of experts or a YouTube breakdown.

    2. Never buy a watch because you think it’ll earn you applause.
    If you’re trying to impress the crowd, the crowd will sniff out your desperation and laugh behind your back. Buying a “manly watch” to look tough is like buying cologne to smell rich. It doesn’t fool anyone.

    3. You don’t need to be rich.
    A $200 G-Shock Rangeman, worn with conviction, beats a $10,000 showpiece worn like a rented tux. Living within your means isn’t just practical—it’s masculine. It’s called integrity.

    In the end, authenticity can’t be strategized. It’s not something you workshop in a resort ballroom between keynote speakers and complimentary wine pairings. It’s not a brand refresh. And it sure as hell isn’t something you can outsource to consultants.

    Whether we’re talking about politics, masculinity, or watch collecting, the minute you start performing sincerity is the minute you’ve already lost it.

    So do yourself a favor: Keep your hobby honest. Reject the Brotox. And wear your damn watch because you love it—not because you’re hoping someone else will.

  • The Fever Swamp of Watch Collecting

    The Fever Swamp of Watch Collecting

    Once upon a time—last week, to be precise—I made a YouTube video arguing that a man should not chase variety in his watch collection but instead find his signature style and whittle his hoard down to a tasteful few. Like a monk with only one robe. Or a chef with one good knife. Or a middle-aged guy who knows that buying yet another GMT won’t fix his marriage.

    Now, did I believe what I was saying? Not entirely. I was, to be honest, talking myself off the ledge. It was a kind of public self-hypnosis: say it enough times on camera, and maybe I’ll stop buying watches I never wear. But I’ll admit—the thought experiment was stimulating, like sniffing ammonia salts just to feel something. Most commenters agreed, saying peace of mind only arrived after purging the herd. But not all. Some insisted that a large, diverse collection brings them genuine joy. Fair. Not everyone needs to live like a horological monk.

    Still, I enjoyed making the video. It felt like intellectual calisthenics for the soul, even if it didn’t convert me.

    One viewer, the formidable “Captain Nolan,” asked a deceptively simple question that demands more than a quick reply:

    “How can you discover your identity without trying watches in every category—divers, pilots, field watches, dress, digital, mechanical, quartz, and so on?”

    By “identity,” he means your taste. What fits your lifestyle, your aesthetic, your internal brand. A fair question. And at first, I answered like a smug adolescent. I said, “You know what you like the same way I knew Raquel Welch was the apex of female beauty when I was nine. One glance. No need to watch Love American Style reruns or thumb through Vogue. Case closed.”

    But that answer is glib. And idiotic. Taste in watches—unlike adolescent lust—is not a hormonal thunderclap. It’s a process.

    So here’s the grown-up answer: yes, you do need to try different styles, just like trying on jackets at Nordstrom. Some are flattering, some make you look like a Bulgarian hitman. It’s tactile. Visceral. And wildly expensive. To really figure out your taste, you may end up spending $5,000 to $10,000 just to land in the right neighborhood. You might call this the Fitting Room Narrative—the idea that trying on a wide range of watches will help you find the “real you.”

    It sounds rational. Comforting, even. But I don’t believe in it.

    The problem is the human brain. It’s not a spreadsheet. It’s a haunted house full of desires, delusions, and marketing fumes. So let me propose a more honest alternative: The Fever Swamp Narrative.

    Here’s how it works:

    You fall headfirst into the hobby. You start buying watches the way a toddler grabs Halloween candy. You buy microbrand divers, G-Shocks, Speedmasters, and maybe a Rolex or two if your credit limit allows it. You tell yourself each one serves a “purpose.” You start spending a grand a month, easy. Over ten years, you’ve spent more than most people do on therapy. And God knows you need therapy.

    Eventually, the collection metastasizes. Dozens of watches, each one representing a temporary high. You stop wearing half of them. You obsess over straps, bezels, lume. Your identity fuses with your hobby. You’re no longer a man who wears watches; you’re a man being worn by them.

    Then comes the collapse: financial strain, marital tension, the vacant stare of a man wondering why he owns three identical Seikos. Maybe you go through a breakup or foreclosure. Maybe your friends stage an intervention. Maybe your dog leaves you. Think about that. Your watch obsession got so bad your dog abandoned you. 

    You finally tap out. Sell the collection. Keep three. Or two. Or one. You tell yourself you’re “cured.”

    Except… maybe you’re not. Maybe, like Bell’s palsy or a bad ex, the obsession lies dormant. All it takes is one random trigger—a stressful day, a YouTube thumbnail, a flash sale—and you relapse. Buy a Sinn. Then a Squale. Then you’re back in the swamp.

    Why do we cling to the Fitting Room Narrative when it’s so obviously false? Because it has a tidy structure. A clean arc. Beginning, middle, resolution. We’re narrative junkies. We want our Luke Skywalkers to finish Jedi school and never regress. 

    Same with watch collectors. We want the Watch Ninja to overcome his demons and live a Zen life with a single Grand Seiko. If he relapses, we unsubscribe. He becomes a punchline. Another Liver King of horology.

    Still don’t believe me? Consider Pete Rose. In the ‘70s, he was “Charlie Hustle,” the human embodiment of work ethic. But zoom out, and the myth crumbles. Pete wasn’t disciplined—he was compulsive. He gambled, lied, betrayed friends. The man was a walking cautionary tale wrapped in a Cincinnati Reds jersey.

    Or take Sedona. Supposedly a spiritual vortex. In reality, a commercialized fever dream of overpriced crystals, green juice, and pseudo-mystical hokum. You arrive expecting transcendence and leave with a maxed-out credit card and lower back pain from a “chakra realignment.”

    We love myths because they sell. But real life is more complicated. Messier. Less flattering.

    So I could tell you a satisfying tale about finding my “true self” through curating a humble collection of retro divers and minimalist field watches. I could wrap it all up with a bow. But I won’t. Because that would be fiction.

    And honestly, haven’t we had enough of that?

  • Trader Joe’s and the End of the World (One Tofu Block at a Time)

    Trader Joe’s and the End of the World (One Tofu Block at a Time)

    With my wife and twin daughters making the long drive home from San Francisco, I realized someone had to restock the household pantry. That someone was me. So by 8 a.m., I was wandering the fluorescent aisles of Trader Joe’s, still half-asleep, in search of tempeh, oat milk, and maybe a reason to keep going.

    Twenty seconds in, I spotted Eliot—a jazz musician in his early forties who’s worked there forever and knows every spice rack and frozen entrée by memory. I hadn’t seen him in a while. He asked if I’d retired from teaching at the local college yet.

    “Two more years,” I said, adding, “but who knows what’s happening to writing classes in the Age of ChatGPT. Everyone talks like they know. They don’t.”

    He asked how I’m handling it in the classroom.

    “I’m not sure I am,” I told him. “I can teach. I can perform. I can entertain. But grading online essays? That’s an existential crisis wrapped in a PDF. I’m dancing in quicksand.”

    Eliot nodded grimly. “This generation doesn’t read.”

    “My daughters don’t,” I said. “Their friends don’t. They’re sweet kids, empathetic and funny, but they don’t seem built for a world that requires deadlines, grit, or employment.”

    Eliot, without hesitation: “We’re screwed.”

    “And there’s no going back,” I said. “CNN gets out-watched by Joe Rogan. Most people get their facts from guys yelling into ring lights while drinking protein shakes.”

    We stared into the epistemic abyss together, nodded, and parted ways before we started crying in the chip aisle.

    Twenty minutes later, I made it to the checkout line, where I was greeted by Megan—the tall, soft-spoken vegan cashier who’s known me for years. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and noticed the mountain of super-firm tofu in my cart.

    We exchanged tofu recipes, talked about the protein digestibility scale, and mourned the impossibility of plant-based love in a society fueled by backyard barbecue. Her breakup, as it turns out, was partly due to meat incompatibility. “He grilled like it was a belief system,” she said.

    We also touched—briefly—on factory farming, which always makes me want to cry or scream or stop eating altogether. But just like I couldn’t solve the collapse of literacy and truth with Eliot, I couldn’t solve the meat-industrial complex with Megan.

    All I could do was pay for my groceries and accept the fact that I’m a limited man in a crumbling culture, armed with tofu, oat milk, and a Costco-sized tub of almond butter.

    I loaded the trunk with the small consolation that I had, at the very least, fed my family.

  • Posting Ennui and the Rise of Podcast Land

    Posting Ennui and the Rise of Podcast Land

    It’s a small miracle that Kyle Chayka’s New Yorker piece, “Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?”, wasn’t published five years ago. The argument feels overdue—like an obituary written long after the corpse started to stink. Chayka observes what most of us have already felt in our scrolling bones: the golden era of amateur posting—your breakfast photo, your blurry concert shot, your moody-filtered selfie—has gone the way of the lava lamp and the Livestrong bracelet. What was once dubbed “valorized amateurism” now reads like cringe-inducing narcissism.

    In its place, we have the glossy perfection of influencers and the manic edge of doom content. It’s either an unboxing of a $5,000 Japanese toaster or a clip forecasting economic collapse by Tuesday. There is no middle.

    Some of this is generational. Millennials have aged out of thirst traps and into soft lighting and privacy. Gen Z, including my daughters, treat public self-aggrandizement with the kind of disgust once reserved for timeshare pitches and chain emails. To them, most online posting isn’t just unnecessary—it’s embarrassing.

    Chayka diagnoses the affliction as posting ennui—the existential fatigue of shouting into a void dominated by micro-celebrity algorithms and brand-filtered banality. We used to post in order to share something real; now we post to survive the algorithm’s cold indifference. And the algorithm doesn’t even show our friends anymore. So what’s the point? The casual post is now a ghost of its former self—undone not by controversy, but by irrelevance.

    Then there’s AI, which hangs over this whole landscape like a digital grim reaper. Now, even authenticity feels manufactured. Who made that caption? Who edited that face? Is that even a real voice? The uncanny valley has extended to your Instagram feed.

    Chayka predicts we may be headed toward what he calls Posting Zero—a post-social media state of blissful digital silence, where the compulsion to perform evaporates, and nobody’s life is reduced to a grid of curated lies.

    And honestly? I’m here for it.

    Let the pixelated word salads and beige hotel mirror selfies die a quiet death. Let the algorithm cannibalize itself. But here’s where I’ll add a wrinkle Chayka overlooks: even as posting dies, Podcast Land thrives.

    The podcast isn’t dead. It’s ascendant. While selfies wilt, microphones multiply. I know people—and I count myself among them—who have fully relocated to Podcast Land. Sam Harris talks to me for two hours a day. I fall asleep to history podcasts. I nap with AirPods in. I swing kettlebells to longform interviews about Stoicism and dopamine. I am deep in Podcast Land. I’ve got residency status.

    So yes, let the Instagram Stories dry up. Let the TikTok dances lose their rhythm. But don’t mistake this silence for disengagement. We’re still listening. We’re still absorbing. We’re just done performing.

    Welcome to Posting Zero. Now please keep your voice down—I’m trying to hear what Sam Harris is saying about the AI Takeover.

  • The Stories We Tell About Finding Happiness Are Probably False

    The Stories We Tell About Finding Happiness Are Probably False

    The other night, I released a video arguing that variety in a watch collection is overrated. Instead of chasing endless categories—divers, pilots, field watches, dress pieces, and the like—we should focus on our personal style and keep our collections small, tight, and true. That was the premise.

    But if I’m honest, I’m not sure I fully believe it. The video was part thought experiment, part self-intervention—an attempt to persuade myself to stop buying watches I don’t have the time (or wrist real estate) to wear. The argument had internal logic. It also had a faint scent of self-justifying desperation.

    And that’s okay. I enjoyed making it. Wrestling with the ideas sharpened my thoughts, and the feedback I received from many of you helped me realize something essential: passion without dialogue is narcissism. Ideas need to be tested by others—challenged, probed, broken open. That’s how belief is forged. Not in solitude, but in the noisy, messy public square.

    It was gratifying to hear from so many who, like me, have felt tormented by a sprawling watch collection—agonizing over wrist time, managing rotations like a circus act, and wondering if maybe the hobby was no longer bringing joy but anxiety in disguise.

    Then came a comment from one of you—Captain Nolan—who posed a question that cut through all my watch-reducing rhetoric:

    “How can you discover what your identity is without trying out watches in the various categories (divers, pilots, field, dress, digital, quartz, mechanical, etc., etc.)?”

    It’s a fair question. One I initially wanted to swat away with a tight two-sentence reply and move on. But I couldn’t. The question lingered—because it isn’t really about watches. It’s about identity. And once you start poking at identity, you’re no longer in YouTube comment territory. You’ve stepped into the philosophical deep end—an arena better suited for Aristotle than for a guy with a camera and a strap obsession.

    The second reason I hesitated is more personal: I only make videos when there’s a spark of fun, curiosity, or joy. The idea of producing a moody think-piece on self-discovery sounded like a slog. Dull. Pretentious. The video equivalent of being cornered by someone at a party who wants to discuss their enneagram type.

    Still, Captain Nolan’s question lodged itself in my mind. How do we figure out what we actually like in watches? And how—after two decades of collecting—did I land where I am now?

    The answer is both simple and brutal:

    There’s the true answer, and there’s the false answer.

    And most people—including YouTubers, influencers, and algorithm-chasing content creators—prefer the false one.

    The False Answer

    The false answer is a story. A myth. A satisfying narrative that wraps things up in a bow. We’ve been telling these stories for millennia. They bring moral clarity, personal triumph, and a happy ending. They sell. They go viral. They’re designed for applause.

    In the watch hobby, this tidy fable is called The Purification Myth.

    It goes something like this:

    You start off as a giddy newbie, blown away by the sheer number of watches out there. You binge. You buy everything from entry-level divers to Swiss Grails. You accumulate far too many watches to wear, and you convince yourself that this is happiness.

    But then comes the crash—maybe financial, maybe emotional, maybe romantic. The fever breaks. You wake up, ashamed of your bloated collection and the dopamine-fueled mania that built it. You sell off everything except a small, tasteful core collection. Peace is restored. Cue soft jazz. Fade to black.

    It’s a good story. It even has some truth in it. But like most recovery narratives, it’s cleaner than reality.

    Because in real life, the fever doesn’t always break for good. You relapse. You sell everything and then buy it all back. You swear off watches on bracelets, only to fall for a titanium chrono six months later. You go minimalist—and then buy a G-Shock with solar charging, atomic syncing, and more features than a fighter jet. Your tastes mutate.

    This is the part the Purification Myth leaves out: people are irrational, compulsive, and deeply inconsistent. And the stories they tell—about clarity, simplicity, “knowing what they want”—are often PR campaigns for whatever identity they’ve temporarily settled into.

    Let me give you some real-life examples.

    The Myth of Pete Rose

    I grew up on the myth of Charlie Hustle–Pete Rose, the man who played baseball like his hair was on fire. The story was simple: if you hustle like Pete, greatness will follow. The world will respect you. You’ll win.

    Turns out Pete Rose hustled only on the field. Off the field when it came to examining his moral flaws, he was a lazy, selfish, self-mythologizing gambler who bet recklessly and burned bridges like he lit cigars with them.

    The moral? The story was inspiring. It just wasn’t true.

    The Sedona Illusion

    My family recently went to Sedona, Arizona—a place that sells its own myth: come sip matcha, get a mud massage, and experience spiritual rebirth in the vortexes.

    What you get is overpriced kitsch, fake mysticism, and conspicuous consumerism wearing a tie-dyed robe. Crystals, smoothies, celebrities in Lamborghinis. It’s Disneyland for people who think they’re too enlightened for Disneyland.

    So yes, I could tell you a satisfying story about how I finally landed on a curated set of Seiko divers, all on straps, and how I found inner peace. But I won’t. Because that’s not the whole truth.

    The real story is messier, and ongoing. It contradicts itself. It evolves. Sometimes it forgets what it believes and remembers something else entirely.

    If you want to find your identity—watch or otherwise—know this: you won’t find it in a story. And you certainly won’t find it in someone else’s.

    You find it in the space between obsessions. In the quiet after the hype fades. In the awkwardness of realizing the thing you thought would make you whole… just doesn’t.

    That’s where identity lives. Not in clarity, but in contradiction.

  • The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Suburban Defiance

    The Farmer’s Carry and Other Acts of Suburban Defiance

    Last night 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 recently broke 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—he’s sad, alright. 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.

    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.

  • Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    In the short story “Gooseberries,” Chekhov builds a quiet indictment of false contentment. The story opens with Ivan Ivanich, a veterinarian, and his friend Bourkin, the schoolmaster, soaked from rain and flushed from vigorous exercise. There’s a rugged, life-affirming joy in their discomfort—an honest happiness born from movement, exposure, and the humbling vastness of the natural world.

    This raw joy stands in mocking contrast to Ivan’s brother, Nikolai, a man who has spent years grinding away at bureaucratic tedium, nursing a fantasy of rural bliss. His goal? To retreat to the country and become a minor land baron, surrounded by gooseberry bushes and sycophantic peasants. Ivan, ever the clear-eyed cynic, knows this is no pastoral ideal—it’s a death wish in disguise. He describes his brother’s dream as “six feet of land,” a nod not to acreage, but to a coffin.

    Drenched and weary, Ivan and Bourkin seek shelter with their friend Aliokhin at his mill. There, Chekhov offers fleeting pleasures: the warmth of hospitality, the intimacy of shared conversation, the sensual revival of a hot bath. These are the real joys of life—ephemeral, yes, but earned and communal.

    And then the story pivots. Ivan launches into his monologue about Nikolai, who finally escaped the city by marrying (and then outliving) an “ugly old widow,” purely to fund his pastoral delusion. The transaction is grotesque in its coldness—he’s not marrying for love but for the deed to a fantasy. When the widow dies, he buys his estate, plants twenty gooseberry bushes, and gorges himself in bloated isolation.

    Ivan visits and is appalled. His brother, the red dog, and the cook—all puffed and pampered—look like livestock awaiting slaughter. They have the physicality of pigs and the spirituality of corpses. Nikolai dotes on his gooseberries with religious fervor, insisting on his happiness. But Ivan sees through it. This isn’t happiness—it’s Joyface, a self-inflicted psychosis, a desperate mask slapped over a hollow life.

    What horrifies Ivan is not merely his brother’s delusion, but its implication: that many of the world’s so-called happy people are just as corrupt, just as morally dead. These are the bloated rich, insulated from suffering, convinced of their own virtue while causing quiet devastation to the world around them.

    To witness such delusion is to lose faith in people altogether. Ivan begins to spiral into misanthropy, seeing humanity not as a noble species, but a swarm of narcissists chasing comfort, stroking their chimeras, and calling it joy.

  • Why I Finally Quit Amazon Vine

    Why I Finally Quit Amazon Vine

    This morning, after 17 years, I finally quit Amazon Vine. The decision was overdue. Over the years, the quality and appeal of the products had steadily declined. Gone were the days of testing laptops and high-end gear. In their place: flimsy gadgets, unvetted accessories, and a parade of plastic odds and ends I never asked for.

    What made it worse was the imbalance. I was doing the product testing and writing detailed reviews complete with photos and “insightful” commentary. In return, I got stuff I didn’t really want and a tax bill for my trouble. Amazon got free labor. I paid the IRS. That’s not a perk. That’s a hustle.

    The required output of 80 reviews every six months might’ve been justifiable when the items were exciting. But lately, writing thoughtful reviews for phone cases, cheap jewelry, and off-brand supplements felt like donating my time to a billion-dollar corporation. It became clear: this was no longer a good use of my energy.

    The moment I quit, I felt an enormous sense of relief. If I want something now, I’ll buy it with my own money. No strings. No tax forms. No obligation to prop up Amazon’s quality control department for free.

    Maybe others are having a better experience with Vine. I hope they are. But after 17 years of watching the program morph into something transactional and thankless, I knew it was time to walk away. This was my experience. I’m glad to be done. Vine used to be fun. It no longer is, so this is the end of an era for me. 

  • Operation 2B: Writing at the Edge of Madness

    Operation 2B: Writing at the Edge of Madness

    Last night, I dreamed I was recruited into a top-secret engineering project. Why? I have no idea. I’m not an engineer. I don’t calculate. I conjugate. But apparently, someone in a conference room with clearance and questionable judgment decided that this classified operation needed… a writer.

    They dropped me into a government-issue apartment compound, a cheerless complex filled with bunking engineers and low-grade existential dread. I was assigned a shared unit with mismatched strangers. One of them, a single mother, had laid out a modest spread of peanut butter, celery, and crackers for her toddler—a rationed still life of parental competence. “Eat,” she told me. “You’ll need fuel for the project.” And so I did—voraciously, like a man preparing to write the Constitution on deadline.

    One by one, my roommates peeled off to private rooms. There was a charming British expat with a silver beard and a childhood photo of himself in a Bentley—Old Money in exile. Despite his aristocratic roots, he was delightfully upbeat, the kind of man who would whistle while burying landmines. But soon, he too was reassigned. It became clear that my “team” had evaporated, and I had been left behind. Not fired. Not forgotten. Just… chosen. To work alone. On a project I didn’t understand. Surrounded by a sea of mechanical pencils. Hundreds of them, like offerings at the altar of Bureaucratic Futility.

    Feeling the weight of vague responsibility, I walked to the project site—a sprawl of white dust and scattered canopies that looked more like a failed music festival than a classified facility. Under one tent, I found two twenty-somethings playing at adulthood. I asked the woman which pencil I should use. She shrugged but confessed the 2B graphite was easiest on her eyes. A clue. A preference. A hierarchy of legibility. I realized she would be my proofreader, my silent companion in this ridiculous odyssey.

    Then came the sign. A man appeared—former military, highly decorated, looking like a character drafted from a Tom Clancy novel. Without a word, he walked up to my apartment door and placed a sign the size of a license plate in the window frame: BE COURAGEOUS. The kind of sign you see right before a high-stakes mission or a TED Talk.

    And that was it. My mission was mine alone. A 500-page manuscript I had to read to prepare myself for the project. No advisor, no support, no backup—just me, a pile of pencils, and a shadowy proofreader who preferred 2B. I awoke shortly after, microwaved some buckwheat groats, brewed a pot of dark roast coffee, and stared into my kitchen tiles wondering if this was a dream about writing… or about surviving it.

  • Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    In the early 90s, my brother managed a spa restaurant at the Grand Wailea in Maui—a temple of eucalyptus steam and $18 cucumber water. His girlfriend, the head chef, ruled the kitchen with the calm authority of a health-conscious empress. I visited one summer and found myself one morning alone at breakfast, sipping coffee and trying to look like a man deep in thought rather than a tourist waiting on papaya boats.

    At the table next to mine sat a striking brunette with the kind of diamond on her finger that doubles as a paperweight. She started talking. To me. Boldly, intimately, as if we were two old conspirators.

    She was thirty-five, married, and bored. Grew up in Santa Monica. Modeled a little. Dabbled in chaos. Now she was married to a man forty years her senior—a retired Navy officer turned business tycoon currently swimming laps in the resort pool while his wife flirted with the help. She pointed out one of the servers, a freckled boy in his early twenties pouring her orange juice with the dreamy smile of a man about to be devoured.

    “I’m sleeping with him,” she said, as casually as if she were announcing she’d tried the papaya last time and found it too sweet.

    She spoke of her marriage like a real estate deal: mutually beneficial, emotionally vacant, and efficiently managed. Her husband financed her yoga retreats. She provided him with public companionship and discreet absence. After breakfast, she was off to a vegetarian cooking class to learn how to live forever.

    She told me she was researching longevity, obsessed with health, and that she was trying to convince her husband to move to Sedona, Arizona—“the best place in the country to live a long life,” she said.

    Back then, I filed Sedona away in the brain folder labeled someday. That place. The Holy Grail of Health. A desert Shangri-La where your body becomes pure and your soul gets exfoliated.

    I didn’t make it there until a few weeks ago.

    We drove in from Prescott, and I’ll admit it: the landscape is jaw-dropping. Red rock formations that looked carved by gods on steroids. Mountains with biceps. Cliffs that scowl. One ridge looked like Zeus doing a lat spread.

    Then we hit the town.

    One-lane highway. Organic restaurants. Shops selling mystical crystals and dreamcatchers made in China. Every storefront promising to “align your energy” or “awaken your inner light”—assuming you have a functioning credit card.

    We took a bus tour. The guide cheerfully explained that tech billionaires ship their Lamborghinis in on trucks just to drive them through town for a week of synchronized flexing, tantric massages, and moon-circle manifesting.

    The mysticism was so heavy-handed it became farce. At a matcha tea stand, a man with unblinking eyes dropped a sugar butterfly into my daughter’s drink and, with complete sincerity, instructed her to make a wish so the butterfly could “help it manifest.”

    That was the moment.

    That was when I realized I hated Sedona. Not the place—God no. The place is stunning. I hated the idea of Sedona.

    Sedona the place is geology and wonder.
    Sedona the idea is a branded hallucination.

    It’s the lie that you can downshift your soul into first gear while screaming through town in a Lamborghini. It’s the peacock strut of spiritual materialism—buying essential oils and amethyst pendants as if they’ll excuse the $5 million home and the $10 million ego inside it.

    Sedona wants you to believe you can live forever if you just buy enough gluten-free sage bundles and whisper affirmations into your Yeti thermos.

    The sugar butterfly? It’s not a wish. It’s a warning.