Cinemorphosis

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  • The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    The Crosswalk That Entered My Brain

    At certain crosswalks, you press the button and wait for the light to change while a Martian voice begins issuing a command:

    Wait.

    A few seconds pass.

    Wait.

    Then again.

    Wait.

    I assume this auditory feature exists for visually impaired pedestrians who need a clear signal before crossing the street, an entirely sensible and necessary function. But apparently nobody designing these systems has discovered a way to make the human voice both audible and pleasant. The crosswalk voice doesn’t merely enter the ear. It arrives through the skull. Each Wait lands less like a word than the neurological thunderbolt that shoots through your body when your bare toe collides with the leg of a dresser.

    A couple of weeks ago, my family and I encountered these talking crosswalks while walking around downtown Carlsbad. At first, I merely disliked the voice. Then it began drilling into my brain. After sufficient exposure, something peculiar happened: my mind decided that the only way to survive the sound was to absorb it.

    I became a victim of Auditory Possession: the involuntary internalization of an irritating sound until you begin reproducing the very noise you desperately want to escape. The crosswalk doesn’t merely assault you with Wait. It enters the nervous system, establishes residency, and eventually begins broadcasting through your mouth. You haven’t imitated the machine. The machine has acquired a human speaker.

    So I began walking around downtown Carlsbad saying Wait in precisely the same robotic voice.

    Wait.

    My family asked me to stop.

    Wait.

    They asked again.

    Wait.

    At this point, they were presumably reconsidering the wisdom of bringing me on vacation. Perhaps I should have remained safely in Torrance, where I could work out, watch true-crime documentaries, and pose no threat to pedestrians.

    Instead, I wandered around a pleasant seaside town sounding like a malfunctioning piece of municipal infrastructure.

    By the end of our walks through Carlsbad, the only true crime anyone had actually witnessed was a grown man roaming the streets repeatedly barking Wait at strangers while his mortified family maintained a safe distance behind him.

  • Sovereignty Erosion

    Sovereignty Erosion

    Last night I dreamed I had houseguests when a group of strangers, apparently Russian, simply entered my home. They didn’t knock, sneak in, or offer an explanation. They arrived with the serene entitlement of people checking into an Airbnb for which I had somehow misplaced the reservation.

    Within minutes they had colonized the place. They used the kitchen. They occupied the bathroom. They took showers. One man wandered around completely naked, his body covered with tattoos, apparently having concluded that sufficient quantities of ink constituted clothing.

    I ordered them to leave.

    They regarded this request as mildly inconvenient.

    I had to tell them several times before they finally gathered themselves and departed. Even then, there was no embarrassment, apology, or acknowledgment that commandeering a stranger’s house might represent a minor breach of etiquette. They walked out with the composure of airline passengers who had accidentally taken the wrong seats and moved only after I produced the boarding passes.

    A few hours later, they came back.

    Apparently my eviction had been interpreted not as a permanent revocation of access but as a temporary scheduling conflict. Once again, I had to order them out. Once again, they eventually complied with the weary patience of people humoring an unreasonable homeowner.

    Then another stranger appeared: a woman in her fifties making watch videos in my atrium. She had apparently identified my home as an excellent location for horological content creation. I told her to leave. She ignored me. I told her again. Nothing. By the fifth command, I was yelling. She finally departed reluctantly, as though I were the lunatic disrupting her production schedule.

    At this point, my houseguests told me to call the police.

    I retreated into a dark room and tried to dial the number. But my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I pressed the wrong numbers. I tried again. Wrong again. The simple act of operating a telephone had become an advanced neurological procedure. I knew exactly what I needed to do, yet the message from my brain seemed to lose voltage somewhere on its journey to my hands.

    My body felt like an electric car limping along with one percent battery: the machinery intact, the destination known, the accelerator pressed, but almost no current left to move the thing.

    Then my hands stopped working altogether.

    That was when irritation gave way to helplessness and finally despair. The strangers were almost beside the point. The true nightmare was discovering that ownership itself had become meaningless. The house was mine. The doors were mine. The rooms were mine. I possessed every legitimate claim to decide who entered and who left, yet my authority seemed to exist only insofar as other people voluntarily recognized it.

    I had entered a state of Sovereignty Erosion: the nightmare sensation of watching authority over one’s own territory gradually dissolve. You own the house. You issue the commands. You possess every legal and moral claim to the space. Yet strangers stroll through your kitchen, shower in your bathroom, film watch videos in your atrium, and behave as though your sovereignty were merely a suggestion awaiting their approval.

    The most frightening intruders, apparently, don’t break down the door.

    They walk through it and wonder why you’re making such a fuss.

  • What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    What Steroids Can Teach Us About Generative AI

    I’ve been examining the effects of generative AI on my college writing students’ compositions over the last four years, and the best analogy I can come up with to get a handle on generative AI is to compare it to the way athletes use PEDs. 

    Athletes want an advantage, they want an edge, and they don’t want their opponents to have a better arsenal at their disposal, so they feel compelled to take PEDs. Same with college students who want the AI advantage. PEDs give athletes confidence that becomes a crutch. As AI does for students. 

    PEDs can give athletes a false sense of power, making them feel like superheroes. These PEDs give dope up their bodies until they don’t want to revert to the natural version of themselves. So does AI for busy students. Students with abysmal reading and writing skills can launder their writing through the AI machine and get a product that looks polished and articulate. This gives them a sense of cognitive doping. They become dependent on its sense of power. 

    Over time, PEDs make the body go flat because it acclimates to greater and greater doses. In this regard, AI makes the brain go flat after its users default to outsourcing their half-baked thoughts and letting AI generate full-blown, overwritten compositions. The disconnection between the writer and the output is soul-deadening. 

    Just as PEDs will never leave sports, AI will never leave writing or academia. Unless the data centers become too expensive to be sustained, the tool is here to stay. 

    The best thing I can do as a college writing instructor is craft assignments that defy AI use, such as field research, interviews, and personal reflections. I know full well that students will try to cheat the system and that I may have to have some blue book compositions to get a better handle on their writing, but we live in a high-performance world where often dangerous tools have to be harnessed. Otherwise, they will destroy us. 

  • The Rearview Great White

    The Rearview Great White

    This morning I drove my daughter and her friend from Torrance to Knott’s Berry Farm, a forty-minute journey that included the usual Southern California ritual of surrendering a portion of one’s life to the freeway.

    On the 91 East, I settled into the diamond lane and soon acquired a companion: a pearl-white Toyota Grand Highlander attached to my rear bumper.

    He stayed there for roughly twelve miles.

    I wasn’t crawling. The driver simply wanted to go faster, and apparently the laws of physics required that he communicate this desire by positioning several thousand pounds of Toyota close enough to inspect the stitching on my back seat.

    About five miles before the Beach Boulevard exit, traffic began slowing. I soon saw why. Two lanes to my right was a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

    Everyone underwent the customary freeway conversion.

    Brake lights appeared.

    Speedometers suddenly became objects of intense scholarly interest.

    Drivers who had been doing eighty-five seconds earlier discovered within themselves a deep and previously unsuspected commitment to public safety.

    The Grand Highlander, however, had apparently missed the announcement.

    He illegally crossed out of the diamond lane, accelerated past me, and continued charging ahead.

    I watched with fascination.

    Surely he’ll see the CHP.

    He didn’t.

    Surely he’ll slow down.

    He didn’t.

    Then he passed the patrol car.

    The CHP officer noticed him immediately.

    The cruiser pulled out.

    It moved behind the Highlander.

    And at that moment, the entire psychological structure of the freeway changed.

    The Highlander hit the brakes.

    Too late.

    The lights came on.

    This is what I call The Rearview Great White: that primitive surge of terror you experience when a police cruiser appears behind you with its lights flashing and you realize, after several desperate seconds of denial, that you are the intended meal.

    There is always that brief period of bargaining.

    Maybe he’s after somebody else.

    You change lanes.

    He changes lanes.

    Maybe he needs me to move aside.

    You move farther right.

    He follows.

    The fin is circling.

    Imagine swimming a hundred yards offshore at Redondo Beach and seeing the dorsal fin of a great white shark rise from the water behind you.

    That’s close enough.

    The Highlander driver, who moments earlier had been exercising dominion over the 91 Freeway, was now prey.

    I expected to feel some schadenfreude.

    I didn’t.

    Partly because I’ve driven more aggressively than I should have myself. Moral superiority becomes difficult when the prosecution has access to your own driving record.

    More importantly, I didn’t think his behavior quite deserved the emotional death penalty.

    On my personal Aggression Scale, I’d give him a six.

    Annoying? Absolutely.

    Reckless? Certainly.

    But I’ve seen eights and nines—the true freeway psychopaths who cross four lanes at ninety miles an hour as though auditioning for a role in Grand Theft Auto: Gardena.

    Had the Highlander been an eight, I might have enjoyed watching the CHP cruiser descend upon him like divine judgment.

    At six, I mostly felt sorry for him.

    I told my passengers that the poor guy was probably hyperventilating.

    Because seeing the lights is only the beginning.

    Now you have to pull over.

    This sounds easy until your nervous system has reverted to that of a gazelle being pursued across the Serengeti. You must find a safe location, activate the turn signal, change lanes, slow down, and demonstrate to the officer that you’re a stable citizen rather than someone about to flee the country.

    Then comes the roadside personality transformation.

    The aggressive driver disappears.

    The tailgater disappears.

    The man who fifteen seconds earlier regarded traffic laws as suggestions issued by lesser men is gone.

    In his place appears the most agreeable citizen in California.

    “Yes, Officer.”

    “Absolutely, Officer.”

    “Of course, Officer.”

    Meanwhile, his shirt is soaked through. His back is glued to the seat. His heart is trying to escape through his sternum.

    The Highlander followed the CHP cruiser down the offramp toward Knott’s Berry Farm, and I continued on my way.

    No triumph.

    No fist pump.

    Just sympathy for a man who had spent twelve miles imagining himself the predator.

    Then he looked in his rearview mirror.

    And saw the fin.

  • Breakfast Eschatology

    Breakfast Eschatology

    I no longer want to resolve my eschatological crisis.

    I don’t want to determine the nature of substitutionary atonement, theodicy, and eternity. I don’t want to debate whether hell is eternal, corrective, metaphorical, mistranslated, or the unfortunate product of several centuries of theologians getting overexcited. I’m tired of sifting through my epistemic crisis as though somewhere beneath a pile of Greek nouns I will finally uncover the laminated instruction sheet for the universe.

    I’ve also given up on perfection, physical, spiritual, and otherwise.

    What I really want is a good breakfast.

    Not breakfast at home. Home breakfast has its virtues, but it is essentially maintenance. Oatmeal. Yogurt. Berries. Protein. The nutritional equivalent of changing the oil.

    I want to go to a café.

    A good one.

    I want banana-nut French toast, buttermilk pancakes, poblano eggs Benedict, crisp potatoes, and a waitress approaching with a coffee pot before I’ve even noticed that my cup is half empty.

    More importantly, I want people. Lots of them.

    A true breakfast is communal. Certain movies become better when watched in a packed theater, where laughter moves through the audience like electricity. Breakfast works the same way.

    The lonely café is hell on earth.

    Three customers scattered across twenty empty tables. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. A laminated menu curling at the corners. Somewhere in the kitchen, a microwave beeps with the melancholy finality of a hospital monitor.

    Technically, breakfast is being served.

    Spiritually, the place is already closed.

    The packed café is another universe.

    You open the door and hear the glorious racket of human appetite. Forks strike plates. Coffee cups land on saucers. Children negotiate syrup distribution. Servers weave between tables carrying platters of eggs and potatoes. The room smells of coffee, butter, toasted bread, maple syrup, and potatoes surrendering magnificently to the griddle.

    Every table is occupied.

    A line waits outside.

    This is not merely a restaurant.

    This is evidence.

    I call it Breakfast Eschatology: the abandonment of speculation about ultimate salvation in favor of recognizing modest intimations of heaven in the communal celebration of a magnificent breakfast.

    For years, I have worried about the Last Things.

    What happens after death?

    What is the nature of original sin?

    What are the rigors of postmortem salvation? 

    What did the Greek word aiōnios mean before two thousand years of theology climbed onto its back?

    At some point, the soul develops theological indigestion.

    Enough.

    Bring me the poblano eggs Benedict.

  • Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    About fifteen years ago, one of my students wrote a personal narrative about losing herself. She was in middle school. Her friends persuaded her to dress in extremely suggestive clothing with tons of makeup. In a revealing outfit that would have caused her mother to have a brain hemorrhage, she looked in the mirror and started crying. “I didn’t even recognize the girl staring back at me,” she wrote. “I wiped the makeup off, got back in my regular clothes, ran home, and cried in bed.” 

    I thought about that image as I started working on some writing prompts for the Fall Semester in which my eighteen-year-old college freshmen contrast writing with AI and writing “natty,” to use an expression that describes “natural” bodybuilders who don’t take performance-enhancing drugs. Generative AI can be a great writing tool, but it tends to overdo everything. Our writing becomes that crying overdone girl staring back at herself, or the bloated bodybuilder who is more cartoon than a celebration of the physique. In all of that generative AI, something gets lost. 

    Us. 

    We can hardly be blamed. Generative AI can feel like magic, taking a 300-word idea and blowing it up into a 2,000-word essay with vivid descriptions, highly stylized metaphors and witticisms, and Socratic rhetorical flourish. Eventually, we begin to believe we are the source of that 2,000-word essay. We flatter ourselves to our own detriment. We lose authenticity. We lose ourselves. We are that middle school girl staring into the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back at us. 

    Using AI tools with my students for the last four years, I can say from personal experience that writing natty feels cleansing, like going off sugar-laden processed foods. Just as too much dessert causes diabetes of the body, too much generative AI causes diabetes of the mind and soul. We need to carve out natural writing spaces where we can connect with who we truly are before it’s too late. 

  • The TikTok Outlaws

    The TikTok Outlaws

    The streets of my town have been overrun by a new species of desperado: The TikTok Outlaw.

    He is thirteen years old, weighs perhaps 115 pounds, and rides an electric bicycle with the serene confidence of a Hell’s Angel who has recently discovered that nobody can touch him.

    I encounter these young road warriors everywhere. They drift into traffic at twenty miles an hour, wobbling in front of cars as though the double yellow line were merely a suggestion left over from a more uptight civilization. Sometimes they turn their heads toward the trapped motorist behind them and flash a triumphant grin.

    The message is unmistakable:

    We own you.

    And, maddeningly, they’re partly right.

    The genius of the TikTok Outlaw is that he has discovered weaponized vulnerability. He is tiny. I am driving several thousand pounds of steel. Under ordinary circumstances, this arrangement should make him cautious.

    Instead, it makes me cautious.

    He knows I will brake.

    He knows I will swerve.

    He knows that I possess insurance, a driver’s license, a conscience, a mortgage, a family, and an overwhelming desire not to spend the remainder of my life explaining why a seventh-grader became permanently embedded in the grille of my car.

    He possesses an e-bike.

    Advantage: seventh-grader.

    The more sophisticated TikTok Outlaws have apparently developed operational security. Some leave their phones behind so parents can’t track their whereabouts. When injuries occur, according to reports I’ve encountered, some have even tried using false names to keep Mom and Dad from discovering that the afternoon bicycle ride somehow concluded in an emergency room.

    This is no longer Leave It to Beaver.

    Wally isn’t asking permission to ride over to Lumpy Rutherford’s house.

    He’s establishing an alias.

    The police, meanwhile, face an unenviable problem. They can monitor social media for planned meetups in which groups of young riders converge on streets and intersections. A dozen e-bikes arrive. Traffic stops. Motorists fume. Phones emerge.

    And that’s the essential ingredient.

    The TikTok Outlaw doesn’t merely want to cause chaos.

    He wants content.

    Without the camera, blocking an intersection is adolescent stupidity. With the camera, it becomes a production.

    The riders are the stars.

    The motorists are unpaid extras.

    The police are villains.

    And the street itself has become a soundstage for the next twenty-second installment of Kids Giving It to the Man.

    This is what distinguishes the TikTok Outlaw from the juvenile delinquent of previous generations. Teenagers have always possessed an impressive capacity for idiocy. That isn’t new. Adolescence has never been famous for its risk-management department.

    What’s new is the audience.

    The idiot of 1978 could impress six friends.

    The idiot of 2026 can fantasize about impressing six million strangers.

    Social media has industrialized adolescent exhibitionism.

    Now public outrage isn’t necessarily punishment. It’s production value. An angry driver leaning on his horn improves the clip. A police officer arriving improves it further. A confrontation is better still.

    The more furious civilization becomes, the better the footage.

    Naturally, the police can intervene. They can issue citations, confiscate illegal vehicles where the law permits, contact parents, patrol gathering places, and disrupt planned meetups.

    But enforcement begins to resemble a man standing beneath Niagara Falls with a roll of Bounty.

    The numbers are too large.

    Another group appears.

    Another intersection becomes a stage.

    Another phone goes up.

    Meanwhile, ordinary motorists crawl through the spectacle with clenched jaws, aware of the exquisite asymmetry governing the encounter.

    We must behave responsibly.

    They don’t.

    That’s their power.

    Civilization depends upon millions of people voluntarily agreeing to certain boring propositions: red means stop, sidewalks are for pedestrians, roads have lanes, and deliberately terrifying strangers isn’t an acceptable recreational activity.

    The TikTok Outlaw discovers that these rules can be exploited precisely because most people still obey them.

    He swerves.

    You brake.

    He laughs.

    You grip the steering wheel.

    He has discovered one of the darker secrets of civilized life:

    The person with the least regard for consequences can temporarily become the person with the most power.

    Perhaps most of these kids will eventually grow out of it. Their frontal lobes will finish construction. Jobs, families, insurance premiums, and the accumulated humiliations of adulthood will perform their ancient civilizing work.

    One day, perhaps, today’s TikTok Outlaw will be forty-five years old, driving home after a long day at work.

    Then a thirteen-year-old on an electric bicycle will drift directly in front of his car, turn around, and grin.

    And somewhere deep inside the middle-aged driver’s soul, an ancient debt will finally come due.

  • The TV Series Best Medicine Is Cognitive Comfort Food

    The TV Series Best Medicine Is Cognitive Comfort Food

    The television series Best Medicine follows a neurotic, antisocial city doctor who relocates to a small coastal town in Maine and discovers, to his horror, other human beings. Gradually, the townspeople penetrate his emotional armor and teach him how to connect, belong, and presumably stop behaving like someone who regards casual conversation as an infectious disease.

    We’ve been here before. Northern Exposure built an entire world around the city doctor exiled among lovable eccentrics. Schitt’s Creek perfected the transformation of prickly outsiders through prolonged exposure to decent people. Best Medicine doesn’t pretend to have discovered a new continent. It arrives at a familiar resort, puts its suitcase on the bed, and settles in.

    Nor is it profound television.

    No one is going to teach a graduate seminar on its metaphysics. You don’t finish an episode and stare silently through the window while reconsidering the foundations of Western civilization. The characters are eccentric but lovable, the town is picturesque, the conflicts remain manageable, and a warm heart beats beneath the entire production.

    Naturally, I enjoy it.

    My wife and I can sit down together and enter this agreeable little Maine universe where damaged people are basically decent, neighbors care about one another, and the human condition can usually be repaired before bedtime.

    This is Cognitive Comfort Food: warm, undemanding entertainment consumed not because we’ve abandoned serious thought but because serious thought occasionally needs to shut up.

    The distinction matters.

    I know Best Medicine can be sentimental. The show knows it too. You can practically see the writers wheeling the emotional casserole into the oven. Here comes the lonely eccentric. Here comes the misunderstanding. Here comes the unexpected kindness. Give it forty-five minutes at 350 degrees and somebody will learn something about friendship.

    Fine.

    I’ll have seconds.

    Normally, sentimentality makes me suspicious. I can see the machinery. I can hear the violins warming up behind the curtain. I know when a television show is reaching into my chest and squeezing the designated emotion gland.

    But there are evenings when I don’t want to fight it.

    The real world has already done enough.

    To say that the world is nasty is hardly an insight. Human beings have been murdering, cheating, betraying, invading, exploiting, and humiliating one another since somebody first discovered that a rock could be used for something other than sitting.

    What has changed is our access to the spectacle.

    We now carry a global misery-delivery system in our pockets.

    War before breakfast. Political outrage with lunch. Murder during the afternoon. Environmental catastrophe before dinner. Then a few minutes of social-media lunacy before bed, just in case the nervous system had somehow retained a molecule of serenity.

    Scroll.

    Atrocity.

    Scroll.

    Corruption.

    Scroll.

    Some lunatic screaming into a camera from the driver’s seat of his car.

    Scroll.

    Civilization apparently ending again.

    Against this backdrop, Best Medicine begins to look less like escapism than neurological first aid.

    For an hour, nobody is trying to overthrow a government.

    Nobody is uploading a manifesto.

    Nobody is explaining why the apocalypse will arrive Thursday.

    Instead, a neurotic doctor is learning to tolerate his neighbors in coastal Maine.

    Perfect.

    Cognitive Comfort Food works because it asks very little from us. Serious art can be magnificent, but serious art is greedy. It wants attention. It wants interpretation. It wants us to confront ambiguity, suffering, mortality, moral compromise, unreliable narrators, fractured identities, and the terrifying possibility that the protagonist’s crisis is somehow our crisis.

    Sometimes I don’t want a crisis.

    Sometimes I want mashed potatoes.

    This doesn’t mean I’ve surrendered my standards. I haven’t decided that every television show should resemble a Hallmark movie in which a high-powered attorney returns to Vermont, saves the family Christmas-tree farm, and marries a carpenter named Luke.

    There is a difference between living on Cognitive Comfort Food and occasionally needing it.

    Nobody should eat cheesecake for every meal.

    But after chewing through the gristle of contemporary life all day, a little cheesecake isn’t evidence of moral collapse.

    Nor does watching an uncomplicated television show necessarily dumb us down. The opposite may occasionally be true. The brain needs recovery just as the body does. Nobody finishes a hard workout and announces that resting afterward represents a betrayal of physical fitness. Yet we sometimes imagine that an intelligent person should remain intellectually clenched from breakfast until bedtime.

    Read the difficult novel.

    Study the political crisis.

    Listen to the serious podcast.

    Watch the prestige drama about intergenerational trauma.

    Contemplate death.

    Repeat.

    Eventually the brain files a grievance.

    So my wife and I sit down and watch Best Medicine.

    We forgive its sentimentality.

    We forgive its lovable eccentrics.

    We forgive the suspiciously therapeutic properties of small-town Maine.

    Most importantly, we forgive ourselves for enjoying it.

    Tomorrow there will be plenty of time for difficult books, serious arguments, moral ambiguity, and the latest evidence that civilization is being operated by raccoons who have broken into the control room.

    Tonight, I’ll take the mashed potatoes.

    The brain needs comfort food too.

    Sometimes that’s the best medicine of all.

  • The Discipline Ceiling

    The Discipline Ceiling

    When I followed baseball in the 1970s, certain teams seemed to have permanent reservations in the cellar. The Milwaukee Brewers. The San Diego Padres. The Washington Senators. I didn’t need to study the standings. I knew where to find them.

    At the bottom.

    Eventually, losing ceased to seem like a temporary condition and became a form of civic identity. Other teams competed for pennants. These teams competed for mathematical elimination sometime around Memorial Day. Their fans could open the sports page in August without anxiety. There would be Milwaukee, comfortably settled into the basement, unpacking boxes and hanging pictures on the walls.

    This is roughly my relationship with 230 pounds.

    For seven years, I have tried to break through that number and descend toward my promised land of 210. Occasionally I approach the border. I eat well. I exercise. I begin imagining myself entering the exotic kingdom of the 220s.

    Then 230 appears at the checkpoint.

    Not so fast.

    At this point, 230 doesn’t merely exist. It has developed a personality. It flexes its biceps. It smokes a cigar. It leans against the clubhouse wall with the serene confidence of a last-place team holding a twenty-game lead over its nearest competitor.

    Go ahead.

    Try something.

    I’ll be here.

    And it is.

    I eat mostly whole foods. In the morning, steel-cut oats. Later, a protein-heavy salad. After my nap, Greek yogurt. Dinner is protein and vegetables. I monitor portions. I exercise. I generally keep my calories below 2,500.

    Then I step on the scale.

    230.

    It’s like opening the sports page in 1974.

    Milwaukee: last place.

    Of course.

    At this point, the fitness tribunals will convene.

    “You’re eating too much.”

    Fine.

    “Reduce your calories.”

    I have.

    “Reduce them more.”

    And here we arrive at The Discipline Ceiling: the point at which a person is technically capable of imposing additional restrictions upon himself but decides that the marginal improvement isn’t worth making everyday life more miserable.

    This distinction matters because whenever weight loss stalls, the discussion inevitably becomes moral.

    You lack discipline.

    You don’t want it badly enough.

    You’re making excuses.

    Really?

    Come spend a week with me.

    Enjoy the steel-cut oats.

    Have another salad.

    Marvel as I spoon Greek yogurt into my mouth for approximately the ten-thousandth time.

    Then join me for dinner, where once again protein and vegetables await like two elderly relatives who have been sitting in the same chairs since the Eisenhower administration.

    I have discipline.

    What I don’t have is any interest in escalating it indefinitely.

    Could I eat 1,900 calories a day?

    Probably.

    Could I start intermittent fasting?

    Certainly.

    Could I go to bed hungry, wake up hungry, drink black coffee while contemplating mortality, and spend the afternoon fantasizing about a baked potato?

    Absolutely.

    I could probably reach 210 if I were willing to make weight loss the organizing principle of my existence.

    But I’m not.

    That’s my Discipline Ceiling.

    The modern optimization culture has difficulty accepting such a ceiling because its governing philosophy is that every measurable human characteristic should be improved until either perfection or death intervenes.

    Weight too high?

    Eat less.

    Still too high?

    Eat less than that.

    Hungry?

    Excellent. The program is working.

    Miserable?

    Even better. Misery demonstrates commitment.

    Soon enough you’re weighing blueberries on a digital scale and wondering whether licking the spoon requires an entry in MyFitnessPal.

    At some point, I decline.

    This doesn’t mean I’ve discovered that calories don’t matter or that my body has repealed the laws of thermodynamics. If I consistently ate substantially less, I would almost certainly lose additional weight.

    The question isn’t whether I can impose more discipline.

    The question is how much of my remaining life I’m willing to surrender to it.

    There is always another restriction available.

    Skip breakfast.

    Eliminate starch.

    Reduce dinner.

    No food after six.

    Fast sixteen hours.

    Fast eighteen.

    Count almonds.

    Fear bananas.

    Treat a tablespoon of peanut butter like an uncontrolled substance.

    Eventually you can become so disciplined that you spend your entire day thinking about the food you’re heroically not eating.

    No thanks.

    I would still like to weigh 210. I would enjoy seeing 225, then 220, then perhaps one glorious morning stepping onto the scale and seeing a number beginning with 21.

    But there are terms.

    I’ll eat nutritious food. I’ll control my portions. I’ll exercise. I’ll tolerate some hunger. I’ll maintain a degree of dietary monotony that would make a monastery cafeteria look like the Bellagio buffet.

    But I will not turn eating into punishment.

    That is the ceiling.

    Perhaps this means I’ll remain at 230.

    Perhaps 230 is my Milwaukee Brewers.

    If so, I’ll continue trying to climb out of the cellar—but I’m not going to set fire to the clubhouse to prove how badly I want the pennant.

    There is discipline.

    And then there is making your entire life kneel before a number on a bathroom scale.

    I’ve reached the ceiling.

    I’m not climbing through it.

  • The Vanity Portal

    The Vanity Portal

    I have learned that something good can occasionally crawl out of an embarrassing place.

    For years, I have entertained a recurring fantasy so vainglorious that merely describing it makes me want to hide under a table. Yet somewhere inside this monument to my own magnificence, I discovered what I call The Vanity Portal: the strange passage through which a fantasy of being admired unexpectedly opens onto a sincere desire to become good.

    The fantasy takes me back to 1983. I am twenty years old again, working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, where I actually worked while attending college. But fantasy has renovated the premises. The wine bar now sits conveniently beside a grand piano, because apparently my unconscious has obtained an unlimited remodeling budget.

    I am not merely an employee.

    I am the entertainment.

    I even have a stage name:

    Lachyrmose.

    There is a ritual to my appearances.

    I am in the beer box, tearing apart cardboard cartons and doing the grubby work of a liquor-store employee, while customers at the wine bar begin demanding music.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    I make them wait.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    Eventually I emerge from the beer box looking like a survivor of industrial combat. Shreds of cardboard cling to my clothes. A sharp carton has scratched my face. My arms bear little cuts and bruises. I am exhausted.

    This is crucial to the fantasy.

    I cannot simply be a gifted pianist. That would be insufficiently magnificent. I must also be a working-class hero who has just finished wrestling cases of beer before casually sitting down at a grand piano and revealing the soul of Rachmaninoff.

    The customers grow quiet.

    Lachyrmose begins to play.

    Melancholy music fills the wine bar.

    On one particularly ambitious occasion, Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett happen to be sitting among the customers. They are staying at the nearby Claremont Hotel and have wandered into Jackson’s for a little wine and relaxation.

    Naturally, they are astonished.

    Who is this young man?

    Minutes ago he was dismantling beer cartons. Now he is producing music of heartbreaking beauty with a completely formed artistic voice. Gabriel and Hackett exchange glances. They understand immediately that they have stumbled upon some rare creature—a bruised liquor-store employee with the soul of a European composer.

    At this point the fantasy has become so narcissistic that it should probably require a permit.

    But then someone else enters it.

    A homeless woman.

    Unlike Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett, she comes from an actual memory.

    I remember seeing her near Jackson’s wearing a red wig she had apparently found in a dumpster. She stood before the reflective glass of a newspaper rack, admiring herself in her new acquisition. The wig was garish and artificial, but she looked at her reflection with pleasure. For a moment, this discarded object had given her something beautiful.

    In my fantasy, she joins the customers at the wine bar.

    I begin playing.

    She listens for a while and then falls asleep.

    The melancholy piano music washes over her as she dozes in her ridiculous red wig. Peter Gabriel listens. Steve Hackett listens. The wine drinkers listen. But gradually they cease to matter.

    When the recital ends, the woman wakes.

    She thanks me for the music.

    I give her a bag filled with deli sandwiches to take with her.

    Of course Gabriel and Hackett witness this too. My unconscious is not yet willing to surrender the production entirely. They were already impressed by my piano playing; now they discover that Lachyrmose is also a humanitarian.

    Apparently musical genius wasn’t enough.

    I required sainthood.

    But then the fantasy changes.

    The woman thanks me for the recital and the sandwiches, and I tell her that no thanks are necessary.

    It was an honor to play for her.

    And I mean it.

    That is the moment when I pass through The Vanity Portal.

    Something strange happens. The fantasy stops being entirely about admiration. Peter Gabriel disappears. Steve Hackett disappears. The wine bar disappears. Even Lachyrmose begins to disappear.

    There is only the woman in the red wig.

    And I love her.

    Not romantically. Not sentimentally. I feel an overwhelming tenderness toward this forgotten person who possesses nothing, who found a discarded wig and briefly admired herself in the glass of a newspaper rack.

    In the fantasy, I tell her that playing for her was an honor.

    But the tears aren’t imaginary.

    I am actually sitting at my piano, playing music and crying.

    This is what disturbs me about the fantasy and prevents me from dismissing it as mere narcissistic theater.

    I struggle with Christianity. I struggle with its doctrines, its claims about salvation, its diagnosis of the human condition, and the enormous theological machinery built around Jesus. I can argue with all of it.

    But in that moment at the piano, I experience something I can only describe as the love of Jesus.

    Not doctrine.

    Not theology.

    An impulse.

    The desire to look upon someone whom the world barely sees and regard serving her not as charity but as an honor.

    And suddenly my ridiculous fantasy has shown me something I didn’t know was there.

    I want to be good.

    I want a pure heart.

    Unfortunately, even my fantasy of purity arrives contaminated by vanity. I cannot simply feed a homeless woman. Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett must be sitting nearby taking notes. I cannot simply play the piano. I must emerge from the beer box bloodied by cardboard, sit before an awestruck audience, and reveal myself as Lachyrmose.

    The ego insists upon producing the show.

    But perhaps this is how The Vanity Portal works.

    We enter carrying our vanity, our fantasies, our desperate need to be admired. We imagine ourselves beautiful, talented, heroic, compassionate. The entire production may be absurd.

    Then, somewhere inside the performance, something genuine appears.

    The fantasy begins:

    Look at me.

    But if we’re fortunate, somewhere along the way another voice emerges:

    Look at her.

    And for a moment, we do.