Cinemorphosis

Tag: bible

  • Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (a short story)

    Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread (a short story)

    When I was five years old and living at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, one of my favorite television shows was Daniel Boone. I was fascinated by Boone’s coonskin cap, especially the raccoon tail dangling from the back. To my young mind, it was the height of frontier elegance. Any man bold enough to wear a dead raccoon as a fashion accessory had to possess uncommon wisdom and imagination. Surely such a man knew secrets unavailable to ordinary people.

    One episode lodged itself permanently in my memory. In it, a destitute man lived alone in the wilderness, gaunt with hunger and desperation. A passerby took pity on him and handed him a loaf of bread. The starving man stood beneath a tree and immediately tore into it. He chewed with the ferocity of a man rescued from the edge of extinction. As he ate, he repeated a single word over and over:

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    The word became a prayer, a hymn, a declaration of gratitude. Watching him, I was struck by a revelation that only a child could find astonishing: this man’s happiness came from something as simple as a loaf of bread.

    The next day, life provided me with an opportunity for field research.

    My mother and I had gone shopping at a local plaza. Returning to the car, we loaded our groceries into the back seat, including a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Before we left, my mother remembered seeing some white divinity and black licorice in a candy store and decided to run back inside.

    “I’ll wait in the car,” I said.

    The moment she disappeared, I launched my experiment.

    I reached into the grocery bag, tore off a chunk of sourdough, and stuffed it into my mouth. Then I began repeating the sacred word from Daniel Boone.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    I was trying to recreate the miracle I had witnessed on television. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be so hungry that a loaf of bread seemed like heaven itself. I wanted to know what true satisfaction felt like.

    Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.

    Something about the image continues to haunt me: the idea of profound hunger meeting simple nourishment. No luxury. No extravagance. No abundance. Just an honest need met by an honest gift.

    The proposition remains irresistible.

    The older I get, the more I understand that the episode was never really about bread.

    It was about hunger.

    The famous biblical phrase tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” Physical hunger is only one of our appetites. Even when our stomachs are full, our mortgages paid, our homes comfortable, and our refrigerators stocked, we remain restless creatures. We hunger for purpose. We hunger for belonging. We hunger for love, friendship, meaning, beauty, and transcendence.

    We hunger for forms of bread that cannot be purchased at a bakery.

    Music is one of those forms.

    I think of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,“ one of The Smiths’ most beautiful songs. The narrator is starving for connection. Home does not feel like home. It feels confining, lonely, and emotionally barren. He longs to escape into the world and find kindred souls who possess the warmth and vitality missing from his life. He dreams of a surrogate family, a tribe of fellow travelers who might finally make him feel understood.

    He does not know where such people are.

    He only knows he needs them.

    His longing saturates every line of the song. Beneath the wit and melancholy is a desperate appetite for belonging. He is emotionally famished.

    In that sense, he is not so different from the starving man beneath the tree in Daniel Boone.

    Both are hungry.

    Both are waiting.

    Both are searching for the thing that will finally satisfy them.

    The difference is that one seeks a loaf of bread while the other seeks companionship, love, and meaning.

    Yet the emotional experience is remarkably similar.

    A starving man dreams of bread.

    A lonely man dreams of friendship.

    And when either finally receives what he has been seeking, the response is the same. Gratitude. Relief. Fullness.

    For a brief and precious moment, the hunger stops.

    Solitude is another form of hunger.

    My mother, who struggled with clinical depression throughout her life, would sometimes disappear from the world for days at a time. She would retreat to her bedroom, pull the covers around herself, and consume novels with the same urgency that the starving man in Daniel Boone consumed his loaf of bread. Page after page disappeared into her imagination. The stories fed something that ordinary life could not. Friends would call. Invitations would come and go. My mother often chose the company of books instead. She possessed a strong reclusive streak.

    I inherited some of it.

    At times, I feel the same longing for friendship and belonging that animates “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” I understand the desire to find kindred spirits and become part of something larger than oneself. Yet I also understand the opposite impulse. Like my mother, there are days when I want nothing more than to be left alone with my podcasts, my kettlebell workouts, and my piano compositions. A quiet room can feel as nourishing as a crowded gathering. Solitude, when freely chosen, can be its own loaf of bread.

    Hunger takes many forms. Some people ache for companionship. Others ache for silence. Most of us spend our lives moving back and forth between the two, never fully satisfied by either and always searching for the proper measure of both.

    Perhaps religious hunger is the greatest hunger of all.

    I experienced it while watching the 1978 Superman movie. I was a teenage bodybuilder then, full of grandiose dreams and the conviction that I was destined for some undefined greatness. Sitting alone in a dark theater, I watched Superman’s father prepare his son for his mission on Earth. He explained that humanity was a lost and fallen people, wandering in confusion and ignorance. Then came the line that pierced me:

    “They only lack the light to show the way.”

    As those words echoed through the theater, something happened to me. A wave of emotion surged through my body. It felt as if a bright light had been switched on somewhere deep inside me. I began to shake. Tears streamed down my face. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I could neither explain nor resist.

    What moved me was not Superman’s strength. It was his purpose.

    For the first time, I recognized a hunger that had been living inside me all along. I wanted to be a light in the world. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help people find their way through confusion, loneliness, and despair. I had no idea how such a calling could be fulfilled. I only knew that the desire burned within me with an intensity I had never experienced before.

    Looking back, I think I was discovering another form of bread.

    Not the bread that fills the stomach, but the bread that nourishes the soul.

    Perhaps this is what people mean by the bread of life: the longing to serve something greater than oneself, to become useful to others, and in that act of service to discover who one truly is. The deepest hunger is not merely to consume. It is to contribute. It is to find a purpose worthy of devotion and, in pursuing it, become fully alive.

    This is not the bread I was raised on.

    I grew up on an entirely different diet of the soul. The culture around me taught that hunger was not a condition to be understood or disciplined but celebrated. Desire was treated as a virtue. Appetite was regarded as a compass. If you wanted something intensely enough, pursuing it was assumed to be an act of authenticity.

    The lesson was repeated everywhere—in movies, television, music, magazines, and the casual conversations of adults. Fulfillment lay just beyond the next indulgence. The good life consisted of feeding every craving and treating restraint as a form of deprivation.

    In that world, desire itself became the bread.

    Longing was not something to transcend but something to obey. Hunger was not a signal pointing toward a deeper need; it was the need. The object of desire mattered less than the pursuit itself. We were taught to trust our appetites, follow our impulses, and regard self-denial with suspicion.

    Most of all, I was taught that carnal desire was the bread of life—that somewhere in the pursuit of pleasure, admiration, conquest, and sensual gratification lay the secret to happiness.

    It took me many years to discover that some forms of bread fill you only long enough to make you hungry again.

    This is not the bread I grew up on. I grew up on a different kind of bread entirely. I was taught that hunger was a good thing and that satisfying that hunger was even better. I was taught that desire itself was the bread. I was taught that carnal lust was the bread of life. 

    I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s, an era that treated recreational sex not merely as pleasure but as a pathway to transcendence. Television, movies, music, magazines, and bestselling novels all sang from the same hymnal. Liberation was the new gospel. Desire was the new sacrament. Happiness, we were told, awaited those bold enough to cast aside restraint and pursue every appetite without apology.

    The adults around me absorbed the message. My parents and their friends attended parties where alcohol flowed freely, clothes disappeared, and the soundtrack from Hair supplied the liturgy. Men’s magazines sat openly on living room coffee tables like decorative centerpieces. Nobody hid them. Nobody seemed embarrassed. They were advertisements for a particular vision of the good life.

    As a teenage boy with raging hormones and a vivid imagination, I absorbed the lesson completely.

    The images and stories convinced me that fulfillment lay in becoming a brazen sexual adventurer. I wanted the muscular body, the effortless charm, the magnetic confidence. I wanted admiration. I wanted conquest. What I did not understand was love. I knew little about devotion, sacrifice, responsibility, or the quiet dignity of caring for another person. Society’s vision of transcendence involved acquiring experiences, not serving people. Other human beings existed primarily as supporting characters in the drama of one’s own desires.

    The consequences of such a worldview are predictable. When people become instruments for self-gratification, hurt feelings, disappointment, alienation, and moral confusion inevitably follow. The bill always arrives, even if it arrives years later.

    Yet even after I grew older and recognized the folly of that outlook, a small part of that younger self remained alive inside me. The fantasy did not simply disappear. It lingered like an old song whose melody still occasionally drifts through the mind. The grand vision of endless Bacchanalian delights never entirely surrendered the stage.

    The challenge became learning not to romanticize it.

    There is a temptation to keep looking backward, to imagine that fulfillment was hiding somewhere in those abandoned fantasies. But looking backward can become its own form of captivity. The story of Lot’s wife endures because it captures a permanent human weakness. We long for the places we have outgrown. We become attached to identities that no longer serve us. We mistake fixation for vitality.

    In reality, selfishness, entitlement, and obsession are forms of death. They narrow the soul. They reduce the world to a mirror.

    I suspect this realization is familiar to anyone who has spent time in an addiction recovery program. Every day counselors sit across from people trying to understand the forces that shaped them decades earlier. The challenge is not simply breaking a habit. It is excavating an entire philosophy of life. Somewhere beneath the addiction lies a vision of happiness that proved incapable of delivering what it promised.

    The task of replacing that vision must be overwhelming.

    I cannot speak for addiction counselors. I can only speak from experience.

    A life devoted to unrestrained hedonism eventually exhausts itself. Chaos has a seductive glamour when viewed from a distance, but living inside it is another matter entirely. The endless pursuit of stimulation becomes tiring. The pursuit of novelty becomes repetitive. What initially feels like freedom gradually resembles bondage.

    Eventually reality intervenes.

    You have a career.

    You have a spouse.

    You have children.

    You have obligations and people who depend on you.

    Maintaining a double life becomes increasingly difficult. You cannot simultaneously inhabit the stable world of family and responsibility while pursuing the perpetual turbulence of adolescent fantasy. Domesticity and satyrhood occupy different planets.

    The older I became, the more I understood that fear has its proper place. Not fear of pleasure itself, but fear of the destruction that follows when pleasure becomes life’s highest value. The consequences are not merely moral. They are practical. Relationships fracture. Finances collapse. Trust evaporates. Even those fortunate enough to avoid financial ruin often leave behind a trail of emotional wreckage.

    Such people are not role models.

    They are cautionary tales.

    The challenge, then, is not merely abandoning an old identity. It is discovering a new one.

    The philosopher Kierkegaard wrote that hope is like finding a new garment. I have always loved that image. A garment shapes how we present ourselves to the world. It signals who we believe ourselves to be.

    When the costume of the satyr no longer fits, something else must take its place.

    That search becomes the next great adventure.

    Not the search for another thrill.

    Not the search for another conquest.

    The search for a life worth inhabiting.

    Sometimes we are too blind, too impatient, or too preoccupied with our ambitions to recognize that the heavenly garment is already draped across our shoulders. We spend years searching for a destiny, an identity, a purpose, convinced that fulfillment lies somewhere beyond the next horizon. Only much later, looking back across the decades, do we realize that we were already wearing the very garment we sought. We simply lacked the wisdom to recognize it.

    I am one of those people.

    As I write this at sixty-four, I find myself looking back to the age of twenty-seven. The year was 1989. It was my final week in Oakland. My belongings were packed into boxes. My future hovered before me in a haze of excitement and uncertainty. I was preparing to leave Northern California for the desert, where I had accepted a full-time position teaching college writing. The move felt momentous, as though I were crossing not merely a few hundred miles of highway but an invisible border between one life and another.

    Before making the four-hour drive through the furnace heat of an August afternoon, I took my car in for service. While mechanics disappeared beneath the hood, I wandered through the loose ends of my final days in Oakland. I had no idea I was standing on the threshold of the life I was meant to live. At twenty-seven, I believed my real story had not yet begun. Looking back now, I can see that it already had.

    This is the story of a day when I was exactly the person I was supposed to be and was too oblivious to recognize it.

    Hungry for lunch while my car was being repaired, I walked to a nearby food court. It occupied an industrial corner of Oakland where the landscape seemed engineered to extinguish hope. Warehouses, loading docks, chain-link fences, and cracked asphalt stretched toward the horizon. The building itself looked less like a place to eat than an aircraft hangar awaiting condemnation.

    Inside, a dozen small eateries lined the walls beneath humming fluorescent lights that washed everything in a pale, exhausted glow. The air smelled of frying oil, grilled meat, bleach, and diesel exhaust. Most of the customers were laborers in reflective vests and steel-toed boots. They sat alone at scarred tables, staring into burritos, chow mein, and paper cups of coffee with the vacant gaze of people whose workday was only half over. No one lingered. No one laughed. The entire place felt like a refueling station for the worn-down and overworked—a temporary shelter before they returned to the machinery, noise, and concrete waiting outside.

    I ordered a combo plate. I no longer remember what it was exactly—chicken and rice perhaps, or some equally forgettable meal. While waiting for my order, I bought a large glass of cold orange juice.

    I was about to take my first sip when a commotion near one of the counters caught my attention.

    A young man, about my age, was struggling to remain upright. He was tall and painfully thin, dressed in faded jeans and a blue T-shirt. His face was pale. His legs trembled beneath him. He explained that he had just sold blood so he could afford something to eat and now felt as though he might pass out.

    An older man behind a Greek food counter looked at me and said, “Give him your orange juice.”

    Without hesitation, I carried the glass over.

    The young man began to sink toward the floor. I slipped an arm around him and held him as he dropped to one knee. With my other hand, I lifted the orange juice to his lips.

    He drank.

    I can still see his eyes.

    Nearly thirty-eight years later, I remember them with startling clarity.

    What struck me was not merely hunger. I had seen hungry people before. What I saw in that moment was a profound loneliness, a depth of sadness and wanting that went far beyond the need for food. This was a man who needed more than calories. He needed kindness. He needed dignity. He needed someone—anyone—to care whether he existed.

    As I held him, I knew instantly that the combo plate I had ordered would never be mine.

    It belonged to him.

    What I did not know at the time was that I was wearing the garment I had been searching for all along.

    I did not know that fulfillment had arrived quietly and without fanfare.

    I did not know that for a brief moment I was exactly the person I was meant to become.

    At twenty-seven, I still believed happiness would arrive through achievement, adventure, romance, status, or some future version of myself that was stronger, wiser, and more accomplished. Yet in that forgotten food court, surrounded by tired workers and fluorescent lights, none of those things mattered.

    What mattered was lowering myself to help another person.

    What mattered was service.

    What mattered was love.

    The bread we hunger for most is rarely the bread we imagine. We spend years chasing appetites, ambitions, pleasures, and identities, believing they will finally satisfy us. All the while, the deeper hunger waits patiently beneath them.

    The daily bread is not merely what sustains the body.

    It is what enlarges the soul.

    Whenever I hear the words, “Give us this day our daily bread,” I do not think of loaves, bakeries, or even hunger.

    I think of the sadness in that young man’s eyes.

    And I remember the afternoon when, without realizing it, I found the nourishment I had been seeking all along.

  • There Is a Bread That Never Goes Out

    There Is a Bread That Never Goes Out

    When I was five years old and living at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, one of my favorite television shows was Daniel Boone. I was fascinated by Boone’s coonskin cap, especially the raccoon tail dangling from the back. To my young mind, it was the height of frontier elegance. Any man bold enough to wear a dead raccoon as a fashion accessory had to possess uncommon wisdom and imagination. Surely such a man knew secrets unavailable to ordinary people.

    One episode lodged itself permanently in my memory. In it, a destitute man lived alone in the wilderness, gaunt with hunger and desperation. A passerby took pity on him and handed him a loaf of bread. The starving man stood beneath a tree and immediately tore into it. He chewed with the ferocity of a man rescued from the edge of extinction. As he ate, he repeated a single word over and over:

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    The word became a prayer, a hymn, a declaration of gratitude. Watching him, I was struck by a revelation that only a child could find astonishing: this man’s happiness came from something as simple as a loaf of bread.

    The next day, life provided me with an opportunity for field research.

    My mother and I had gone shopping at a local plaza. Returning to the car, we loaded our groceries into the back seat, including a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Before we left, my mother remembered seeing some white divinity and black licorice in a candy store and decided to run back inside.

    “I’ll wait in the car,” I said.

    The moment she disappeared, I launched my experiment.

    I reached into the grocery bag, tore off a chunk of sourdough, and stuffed it into my mouth. Then I began repeating the sacred word from Daniel Boone.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    I was trying to recreate the miracle I had witnessed on television. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be so hungry that a loaf of bread seemed like heaven itself. I wanted to know what true satisfaction felt like.

    Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.

    Something about the image continues to haunt me: the idea of profound hunger meeting simple nourishment. No luxury. No extravagance. No abundance. Just an honest need met by an honest gift.

    The proposition remains irresistible.

    The older I get, the more I understand that the episode was never really about bread.

    It was about hunger.

    The famous biblical phrase tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” Physical hunger is only one of our appetites. Even when our stomachs are full, our mortgages paid, our homes comfortable, and our refrigerators stocked, we remain restless creatures. We hunger for purpose. We hunger for belonging. We hunger for love, friendship, meaning, beauty, and transcendence.

    We hunger for forms of bread that cannot be purchased at a bakery.

    Music is one of those forms.

    I think of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,“ one of The Smiths’ most beautiful songs. The narrator is starving for connection. Home does not feel like home. It feels confining, lonely, and emotionally barren. He longs to escape into the world and find kindred souls who possess the warmth and vitality missing from his life. He dreams of a surrogate family, a tribe of fellow travelers who might finally make him feel understood.

    He does not know where such people are.

    He only knows he needs them.

    His longing saturates every line of the song. Beneath the wit and melancholy is a desperate appetite for belonging. He is emotionally famished.

    In that sense, he is not so different from the starving man beneath the tree in Daniel Boone.

    Both are hungry.

    Both are waiting.

    Both are searching for the thing that will finally satisfy them.

    The difference is that one seeks a loaf of bread while the other seeks companionship, love, and meaning.

    Yet the emotional experience is remarkably similar.

    A starving man dreams of bread.

    A lonely man dreams of friendship.

    And when either finally receives what he has been seeking, the response is the same. Gratitude. Relief. Fullness.

    For a brief and precious moment, the hunger stops.

    Solitude is another form of hunger.

    My mother, who struggled with clinical depression throughout her life, would sometimes disappear from the world for days at a time. She would retreat to her bedroom, pull the covers around herself, and consume novels with the same urgency that the starving man in Daniel Boone consumed his loaf of bread. Page after page disappeared into her imagination. The stories fed something that ordinary life could not. Friends would call. Invitations would come and go. My mother often chose the company of books instead. She possessed a strong reclusive streak.

    I inherited some of it.

    At times, I feel the same longing for friendship and belonging that animates “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” I understand the desire to find kindred spirits and become part of something larger than oneself. Yet I also understand the opposite impulse. Like my mother, there are days when I want nothing more than to be left alone with my podcasts, my kettlebell workouts, and my piano compositions. A quiet room can feel as nourishing as a crowded gathering. Solitude, when freely chosen, can be its own loaf of bread.

    Hunger takes many forms. Some people ache for companionship. Others ache for silence. Most of us spend our lives moving back and forth between the two, never fully satisfied by either and always searching for the proper measure of both.

    Perhaps religious hunger is the greatest hunger of all.

    I experienced it while watching the 1978 Superman movie. I was a teenage bodybuilder then, full of grandiose dreams and the conviction that I was destined for some undefined greatness. Sitting alone in a dark theater, I watched Superman’s father prepare his son for his mission on Earth. He explained that humanity was a lost and fallen people, wandering in confusion and ignorance. Then came the line that pierced me:

    “They only lack the light to show the way.”

    As those words echoed through the theater, something happened to me. A wave of emotion surged through my body. It felt as if a bright light had been switched on somewhere deep inside me. I began to shake. Tears streamed down my face. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I could neither explain nor resist.

    What moved me was not Superman’s strength. It was his purpose.

    For the first time, I recognized a hunger that had been living inside me all along. I wanted to be a light in the world. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help people find their way through confusion, loneliness, and despair. I had no idea how such a calling could be fulfilled. I only knew that the desire burned within me with an intensity I had never experienced before.

    Looking back, I think I was discovering another form of bread.

    Not the bread that fills the stomach, but the bread that nourishes the soul.

    Perhaps this is what people mean by the bread of life: the longing to serve something greater than oneself, to become useful to others, and in that act of service to discover who one truly is. The deepest hunger is not merely to consume. It is to contribute. It is to find a purpose worthy of devotion and, in pursuing it, become fully alive.

  • Gollumification (a short story)

    Gollumification (a short story)

    I remain haunted by three men I attended high school with. More than four decades later, they are still gnashing their teeth over a missed romantic opportunity so catastrophic in their minds that it has become the organizing principle of their existence.

    The event occurred during the summer after their senior year, that magical season when testosterone, optimism, and stupidity join forces to create lifelong consequences.

    The three friends were driving from the Bay Area to Los Angeles to attend a Dodgers game when they found themselves winding through the Grapevine. There, on the side of the highway, destiny appeared: four young women wearing tie-dye bikinis.

    An aging Volkswagen van, baked by the California sun into a shade best described as “burnt pumpkin regret,” had overheated and died. Standing beside it were four beautiful Grateful Dead devotees fresh from a concert and still drifting through the atmosphere on a cloud of music, freedom, and whatever else had been circulating at Dead shows in those years.

    These were not merely attractive women. In the mythology my friends later constructed, they became supernatural beings. They were road-worn muses, desert sirens, barefoot priestesses of possibility. They smelled of patchouli, sunscreen, and poor judgment. Their laughter floated through the air like wind chimes. Their sun-bronzed shoulders glistened beneath the California light. They waved their bikini tops and spaghetti-strap shirts overhead like flags announcing the arrival of a new religion.

    My friends, mechanically gifted but cosmically clueless, leaped into action.

    With grease-stained heroism, they diagnosed the problem, coaxed the van back to life, and restored order to the universe. The women were grateful. Very grateful.

    Then came the invitation.

    Forget the Dodgers game, they said. Come with us to the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival.

    To appreciate the magnitude of this offer, imagine being handed a winning lottery ticket, a backstage pass, and the keys to paradise simultaneously.

    My friends declined.

    They were committed to the Dodgers game.

    Even now, recounting the story causes physical pain.

    Armed with baseball tickets and the situational awareness of ornamental shrubbery, they thanked the women, climbed back into their car, and drove away. Behind them, the hippies disappeared into the California horizon, presumably continuing their lives completely unaware that they had become the central tragedy in three future divorces.

    My friends remember almost nothing about the baseball game.

    Not a single play.

    Not a single pitch.

    Not a single inning.

    But they can describe, with forensic precision, the exact moment they drove away from those women. They remember the sunlight, the smell of the road, the angle of the van, the sound of the laughter, and the fluttering of tie-dye fabric in the wind.

    Mention the incident today and they transform.

    Reason departs.

    Perspective evaporates.

    They begin snapping at one another like feral animals fighting over a scrap of meat. Each insists the others were responsible. Each argues that his entire life would have unfolded differently had they accepted the invitation.

    Their present lives barely register. Their former wives, their careers, their accomplishments, and their friendships all fade into the background. Spiritually speaking, they remain stranded on that highway, staring at those women as if they represented the entrance to a lost kingdom.

    The story would be funny if it were not so sad.

    The obsession has consumed them.

    They are bitter. They are divorced. They are trapped.

    They have spent decades worshipping a fantasy.

    What they believe they lost was not a romantic encounter. It was transcendence itself. They have convinced themselves that heaven briefly opened a window on a sunny California afternoon and that they foolishly chose baseball instead.

    This is what I call Gollumification: the process by which a person becomes spiritually deformed through obsessive attachment to a lost opportunity, fantasy, or object of desire, sacrificing present reality in worship of an imagined transcendence.

    The tragedy is not that they missed an opportunity.

    The tragedy is that they never stopped missing it.

    Their humanity has slowly curdled around a single idea: that fulfillment existed on the other side of that decision. Like Gollum clutching the Ring, they have spent decades staring at a false treasure while life continued to unfold around them.

    The writer and pastor Eugene Peterson warned that human beings frequently seek false transcendence through sex, alcohol, drugs, crowds, and ecstatic experiences. These pursuits promise elevation but often produce degradation. We imagine we are ascending toward something divine when in fact we are becoming diminished versions of ourselves.

    My friends illustrate this principle perfectly. They mistook a fleeting moment of possibility for ultimate meaning. They sought transcendence in the wrong place and became enslaved to the memory.

    To be human is not merely to desire transcendence. It is to recognize when that desire has attached itself to the wrong object. It is to notice the onset of Gollumification, slam on the brakes, and reverse the process before obsession calcifies into identity.

    Few people accomplish this.

    Most continue worshipping the lost opportunity, the former lover, the abandoned dream, the imagined paradise. Year after year, they become less flexible, less grateful, less alive. They harden around their regrets until they resemble pillars of salt, forever staring backward at the kingdom they believe should have been theirs.

    The missed opportunity did not ruin their lives.

    Their refusal to stop worshipping it did.

    I can worry about many things. I can worry about politics, the economy, my health, the future, and whether humanity is collectively losing its mind. But is there anything more important than waking up each morning prepared for my daily arm-wrestling match with Gollum?

    There he sits across the table waiting for me.

    He smiles with the confidence of an undefeated champion. He knows my weaknesses better than I do. He knows exactly where the cracks are in the foundation. He knows which temptations still sparkle in my imagination and which regrets still ache when I press on them.

    “Go ahead,” he says. “Try to beat me. Win today if you can. I’ll even let you enjoy the victory. But remember, I have thousands more opportunities. Tomorrow morning. This afternoon. Ten minutes from now. Next week. Next year. I can wait.”

    Then Gollum leans back in his chair and laughs.

    Unlike me, he never gets tired.

    Don’t feel sorry for me. My predicament is not unique. Like millions of others, I suffer from an addiction to shiny objects promising transcendence. What am I addicted to? That is the wrong question. The better question is: what am I not addicted to?

    Human beings have always been vulnerable to false promises of salvation. Some chase money. Others chase status, romance, sex, drugs, fame, luxury, political power, youth, beauty, watches, social media followers, or the approval of strangers. The particulars vary, but the underlying temptation remains the same. We convince ourselves that one more acquisition, one more achievement, one more experience, one more dopamine hit will finally complete us.

    There are tens of millions of us. I am not special.

    My life, like theirs, is defined by the constant struggle against vice, corruption, vanity, and the habits that threaten to reduce me to a lesser version of myself.

    Yet there is another danger.

    It is true that I am flawed. It is true that I have made mistakes. It is true that I possess an impressive talent for disappointing myself. But endlessly dwelling on my failures is simply another addiction wearing a different costume.

    I think of the writer and commentator Ana Marie Cox, who once observed that she struggled with many addictions, but the worst was picking up the bottle of self-loathing and drinking from it all day long.

    What a perfect image.

    Many of us stagger through life intoxicated by our own self-contempt. We nurse old embarrassments. We replay old failures. We rehearse our shortcomings with the diligence of scholars preserving sacred texts. We imagine this habit is a form of honesty or moral seriousness. In reality, it is often another form of self-absorption.

    The person addicted to self-loathing is no less trapped than the person addicted to alcohol, gambling, or pornography.

    Both are attempting to escape reality.

    And both find themselves drifting deeper into captivity.

    This compulsive consumption of self-hatred makes self-forgiveness nearly impossible. Yet self-forgiveness is one of the essential weapons in the fight against Gollumification.

    How can I forgive myself?

    The question sounds simple but feels impossible.

    After all, I know my failures better than anyone. I know the selfishness, vanity, cowardice, and foolishness that inhabit my history. I know the person I have been. Some days I find it nearly impossible to forgive myself for being such a wretched creature.

    But forgive myself I must.

    Forgiveness is not an act of indulgence. It is not a declaration that my failures never happened. It is not permission to continue living badly.

    Forgiveness is the first step in refusing to let my worst moments define me.

    It is the decision to stop worshipping my failures and start transcending them.

    Forgiveness is the commitment to become someone different from the stubborn sinner who generated so much regret in the first place. It is the refusal to spend the rest of my life drinking from the bottle of self-loathing while Gollum grins across the table.

    Because Gollum does not care whether I worship a lost opportunity or a past mistake.

    Either way, he wins.

    The only victory available to me is to stand up from the table, forgive myself, and continue the long work of becoming fully human.

    Once I understood that life is a continual test of character, and the struggle against Gollumification, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against Gollum. I cannot always defeat him in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome Gollum half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily effective at razzle-dazzling you with objects of false transcendence and getting you to surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you. As a result, you are becoming Gollum. 

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

    The process of emancipating yourself from whatever hell you have wandered into is one of life’s essential tasks. Whether the prison is addiction, vanity, resentment, consumerism, or some other self-inflicted captivity, freedom rarely arrives on its own. 

    It helps to have role models—people who have somehow escaped the Sunken Place while the rest of us continue orbiting the same destructive habits.

    I have such a role model. His name is The Lonely Collector.

    I met him on the watch forums and social-media platforms where watch enthusiasts gather to discuss their latest acquisitions, compare collections, and reassure one another that purchasing yet another timepiece is not a symptom of a deeper problem. These communities often resemble support groups designed by the addiction itself. They are places where people seek solace and commiseration but rarely recovery. Imagine a convention of alcoholics held inside a liquor store. The attendees nod sympathetically as one another describes their struggles, then recommend a particularly excellent bottle that just arrived from Scotland.

    The watch world can be like that.

    Yet somehow The Lonely Collector moved among us untouched. While the rest of us disappeared down the timepiece rabbit hole, emerging weeks later clutching limited editions and obscure Japanese-market references, he remained curiously immune. He could admire a watch without needing to own it. He could discuss a new release without calculating how quickly he could justify purchasing it. He possessed a form of psychological insulation that bordered on the supernatural.

    I often imagined him wearing some kind of invisible protective suit, the sort of flame-retardant gear stuntmen wear before walking through walls of fire on Hollywood movie sets. Around him, collectors were exploding into fits of acquisition fever, setting their wallets ablaze in pursuit of the next grail watch, while he calmly strolled through the inferno without so much as singeing an eyebrow. He seemed to understand something the rest of us did not: that collecting a watch and being possessed by the desire to collect watches are two entirely different things.

    I met the Lonely Watch Collector about six years ago in the digital bazaar of watch enthusiasts, where grown men gather to convince one another that a slightly different arrangement of steel, sapphire, and gears constitutes a life-changing event. We became friends across several watch forums and social-media platforms. His Americanized name was Peter. He was a Vietnamese immigrant who worked in the tech industry and lived in the Dallas area.

    One day he sent me a message that immediately distinguished him from the usual crowd of enablers and acquisition evangelists. He confessed that he was, like me, a watch addict. Not a casual enthusiast. Not a collector. An addict. His condition had become so severe that he eventually sold every watch he owned, including pieces that cost nearly ten thousand dollars. In their place he bought a twenty-dollar Casio F91.

    The move struck me as both absurd and profound. Imagine a man abandoning a wine cellar filled with rare vintages only to drink tap water for the rest of his life.

    Peter explained that the Casio served a purpose beyond telling time. It was a daily reminder of how thoroughly the hobby had colonized his mind. Every glance at its tiny digital display reminded him of the sharp jaws of the addiction from which he had escaped. The humble plastic watch became a form of self-discipline, a wearable warning label. He never wanted to return to those feverish days when every waking hour was spent chasing the next purchase, the next dopamine hit, the next fantasy of completion that vanished the moment the package arrived.

    At the time he was in his mid-thirties, married, and raising a newborn child. He had decided that his attention was a finite resource. Every ounce of mental energy spent obsessing over watches was energy unavailable to his wife, his son, and the life unfolding directly in front of him. He chose his family over watches.

    Over the years he would occasionally contact me. He would compliment one of my latest acquisitions, mention that he had watched another video from my YouTube channel, where I often explored the psychology of watch addiction, and then close with the same refrain.

    He was still wearing the Casio.

    The statement was never delivered with judgment. He never lectured me. Never told me to sell my collection. Never suggested I quit the hobby. Yet I could feel the unspoken message beneath his words. It radiated from the quiet contentment he seemed to have found. He had escaped a maze that many of us were still wandering. Without saying so directly, he wanted me to find the exit as well.

    Then, about a year ago, I noticed that he had vanished.

    Not from my life specifically. From the platforms themselves.

    His accounts disappeared. No dramatic farewell. No manifesto. No final post announcing his liberation from the algorithmic plantation. He simply left.

    I found myself oddly moved by his disappearance. He had already been a hero of mine for replacing a small fortune in luxury watches with a twenty-dollar Casio. But abandoning social media entirely elevated him to an even higher category. Even more important than escaping the watch addiction, he had escaped from the social media platforms. 

    Most of us treat these platforms as public squares. However, they are closer to dopamine troughs—vast digital feedlots where human attention is harvested, processed, and sold. Every notification is a pellet tossed into the cage. Every scroll promises stimulation and delivers restlessness instead.

    Peter walked away from all of it.

    I have experienced watch-related FOMO countless times. I have watched men on YouTube peel the protective plastic from a new Panerai, Omega, or Tudor with the reverence of archaeologists uncovering a sacred relic. For a moment, I would feel the familiar pang—that small stab of desire convincing me that happiness was apparently one purchase away.

    But that feeling was insignificant compared to the FOMO I felt when I thought about Peter.

    I did not envy his watches. He no longer had any.

    I envied his freedom.

    He had escaped not only the watch fever dream but also the sprawling digital carnival that feeds it. He had walked away from the endless cycle of acquisition, validation, comparison, and display. No wrist shots. No watch forums. No YouTube rabbit holes. No dopamine pellets dispensed by algorithms disguised as communities.

    Sometimes I imagined becoming like him.

    Of course, being afflicted with a healthy case of vanity, I never imagined quietly disappearing the way Peter did. No. In my fantasy, I would announce my departure with a bombastic YouTube video worthy of a retiring televangelist, a defeated Roman emperor, and a recovering addict all rolled into one.

    The thumbnail would feature me staring solemnly into the camera beneath giant yellow letters:

    I AM LEAVING THE WATCH HOBBY.

    The video would begin with a dramatic pause.

    “God has told me to quit collecting watches.”

    Another pause.

    “I do not wish to quit collecting watches. Quite frankly, I would prefer to buy several more. But this is no longer a matter of my will. It is a matter of God’s will.”

    At this point I would lean toward the camera as if preparing to reveal the final secret of existence.

    “Today, ladies and gentlemen, we are going to discuss freedom. Not the freedom we celebrate, but the freedom we counterfeit. We tell ourselves that every indulgence is an act of self-expression. We call surrendering to our impulses freedom. We call compulsive consumption freedom. We call addiction freedom.”

    Then I would hold up a luxury watch.

    “This is not freedom.”

    A dramatic pause.

    “This is jewelry for Gollum.”

    I would continue.

    “We are undergoing a process I call Gollumification. We clutch our precious possessions with trembling fingers and then congratulate ourselves for being independent thinkers. We mistake obedience to our appetites for self-mastery. We chain ourselves to desires and then celebrate the length of the chain.”

    By this point the comments section would be in flames.

    Half the audience would accuse me of having a nervous breakdown. The other half would demand to know whether I was selling my collection.

    Meanwhile, Peter would be sitting somewhere in Dallas wearing his twenty-dollar Casio, helping his kid with homework, blissfully unaware that I had just uploaded a forty-five-minute philosophical monologue about the spiritual dangers of luxury watches.

    And that contrast is precisely why he won.

    I needed an audience to imagine my liberation.

    Peter simply liberated himself.

    Could I ever forgive myself for not possessing Peter’s strength? For lacking his discipline? For remaining vulnerable to the vanity and compulsions that he had managed to escape?

    I did not know.

    But I knew I had to try.

    In many ways, that is the reason for telling this story. Not to celebrate Peter as some flawless saint, nor to condemn myself as uniquely weak, but to confront a question that lurks beneath every addiction and every act of self-deception: What would it mean to become a little more free than I am now?

    Peter answered that question by quietly walking away.

    I didn’t hear from Peter for about a year, but one day he commented on my YouTube channel that he and his wife were visiting family in Los Angeles, and he suggested we meet for coffee at a local cafe. 

    The coffee shop possessed the warm, cultivated coziness that modern cafés seem to manufacture with scientific precision. Sunlight spilled through tall front windows and settled across weathered wooden tables polished smooth by years of elbows, laptops, and lingering conversations. The air carried a mingled perfume of freshly ground coffee beans, toasted pastries, steamed milk, and cinnamon. A low murmur of conversation drifted through the room, punctuated by the occasional hiss of the espresso machine and the clatter of ceramic cups meeting saucers.

    Peter sat at a corner table with his wife and two young children. I had expected to find him alone, but instead I found a scene of quiet domestic happiness. The children, perhaps two and four years old, sat absorbed in coloring books spread across the table. They worked with the intense concentration that only young children can summon for such endeavors. One would occasionally hold up a page for parental approval while the other remained determined to keep every crayon stroke inside the lines.

    Peter’s wife, Pam, an attractive redhead in her mid-thirties, watched over them with an easy smile, alternating between conversation and gentle supervision. Both she and Peter had their arms covered in an impressive collection of tattoos. Yet whatever rebellious or edgy associations I once attached to tattoos evaporated almost immediately. The two of them radiated warmth, kindness, and ease with one another. They possessed that unmistakable quality found in genuinely happy couples: a relaxed affection that requires no performance and no explanation. Watching them interact with their children, it became clear that the tattoos were merely decoration. The deeper story was written in their patience, their attentiveness, and the quiet contentment they shared as a family.

    Around them, the coffee shop’s usual cast of characters carried on with their rituals. Young professionals peered into glowing laptops. Students hunched over textbooks as though preparing for oral examinations before a medieval tribunal. A retired couple shared a muffin and the morning’s gossip. Yet the scene at Peter’s table seemed somehow untouched by the surrounding bustle. The children colored. The parents relaxed. The aroma of coffee drifted through the air. It was the sort of ordinary family moment that often passes unnoticed while it is happening but later returns in memory with surprising clarity and affection.

    Peter introduced me to his wife as his “YouTube hero.”

    I immediately objected.

    “I can’t be your hero,” I said. “You’re my hero.”

    After all, Peter had accomplished something I had not. He had escaped. He had walked away from the watch addiction, abandoned social media, and returned to the land of the living. While the rest of us were still debating the merits of sapphire crystals and limited editions, Peter had slipped out of the casino and gone home.

    Pam laughed.

    As a therapist, she had developed a dim view of social media. What had once seemed novel now struck her as tacky—a vast digital theater in which people carefully curated evidence that their lives were perpetually delightful. The result was a form of psychological vandalism. People scrolled through these highlight reels and concluded that everyone else was happier, prettier, wealthier, more successful, and more fulfilled than they were.

    “People think we’re perfect,” Pam said. “But we have our struggles.”

    The statement caught me off guard.

    From where I sat, they looked like the cover photo for a family counseling brochure. Two adorable children. A happy marriage. Meaningful careers. The sort of family that made you assume the universe had quietly decided to be generous.

    Then Pam explained that she suffered from clinical depression.

    There were periods, she said, when the depression became so severe that she could go months without being emotionally available to her husband or children. I found this difficult to reconcile with the woman sitting across from me. She appeared warm, attentive, thoughtful, and fully engaged. She looked like the last person who would disappear behind a wall of emotional darkness.

    Yet there she was describing a battle that remained invisible to everyone except those closest to her.

    The irony was striking. Here was a therapist who attended therapy herself. Here was a mental-health professional who required help from other mental-health professionals. After years of trial and error, she had finally found the proper balance of medication—enough to keep the depression from swallowing her whole but not so much that it dulled her emotions and left her disconnected from the people she loved.

    The conversation reminded me how deceptive appearances can be. Social media trains us to judge lives from the outside, but real life operates differently. Everyone is carrying something. Some burdens are simply hidden beneath better lighting, flattering camera angles, and carefully edited captions.

    The family sitting before me was not perfect.

    They were something far more impressive.

    They were real.

    I sat there taking in the scene before me. The children colored quietly. Peter and Pam exchanged the effortless glances of people who genuinely liked each other. The entire family radiated a warmth that was difficult to describe and impossible to fake. To my surprise, I felt myself getting emotional. I wanted so badly for them to be happy that my eyes began to sting.

    To distract myself, I pointed at the small Casio on Peter’s wrist.

    “Peter,” I asked, “how did you do it? How did you walk away from the watch addiction?”

    He didn’t hesitate.

    “It’s like this,” he said. “I think of addiction as a hot stove. You touch it and it burns like hell. After a while, you stop romanticizing the stove. You stop admiring the stove. You stop writing poems about the stove. You realize the stove can hurt you. Once you see it for what it is, it becomes easier to stay away.”

    I laughed.

    “But you still watch my YouTube channel. That’s like an alcoholic hanging around a liquor store. Every week some lost soul gets on camera, complains about his watch addiction, and then spends twenty minutes showing off shiny watches.”

    Peter laughed.

    Tall and slender, with short dark hair, sharp features, and glasses that gave him the appearance of a thoughtful professor, he seemed amused by the accusation.

    “I watch cooking competition shows,” he said. “I enjoy the craftsmanship, the attention to detail, the incredible food. But I know I’m not going to spend twelve hours making those dishes. It’s entertainment. Your videos are the same thing. I can enjoy watching them without feeling compelled to live that life.”

    “I’m a cautionary tale,” I said.

    That earned a laugh from both him and Pam.

    The two of them shared a piece of banana bread while looking at me with the kind of affection usually reserved for eccentric relatives.

    “You see me for what I am,” I continued. “But you don’t glorify my life. You understand there is no transcendence in watches.”

    Peter smiled.

    “There’s no transcendence,” he repeated.

    The sentence hung in the air for a moment.

    “You have your family,” I said. “You have real things to take care of.”

    Peter reached for Pam’s hand and squeezed it.

    Then he smiled at her.

    “I have no time for fantasies.”

    The simplicity of the statement struck me harder than any self-help book ever could.

    I found myself thinking about the three men from my high school days. I told Peter and Pam the entire story: the broken-down Volkswagen van, the Grateful Dead girls, the invitation to the Summer Solstice Festival, and the decades of regret that followed. I explained how the men had become consumed by what might have been, how they had transformed a brief encounter into a lost Eden, and how they had spent years undergoing the process I call Gollumification.

    As I spoke, I could see that Peter and Pam were enjoying the story.

    “What happened to them?” Pam finally asked.

    “Where are they now?” Peter added.

    I told them.

    They lived alone in modest apartments. They drifted from paycheck to paycheck. Their lives felt provisional, as though they were still waiting for the real story to begin. They possessed no grand purpose, only old grievances. Their conversations revolved around disappointments, regrets, and imagined alternate timelines in which everything had gone right.

    They had become caretakers of a fantasy.

    And that fantasy had slowly devoured them.

    As I spoke, I realized why the story continued to haunt me.

    It wasn’t because of the hippie girls.

    It wasn’t because of the missed opportunity.

    It was because I understood how easily their fate could become mine.

    Every day I struggle not to become one of those men. Every day I fight the temptation to believe that fulfillment lies somewhere else: in another watch, another achievement, another fantasy, another version of my life that never existed.

    Every day I struggle against Gollumification.

    And sitting there across from Peter and Pam, watching their children color pictures while they shared a piece of banana bread, I was struck by a thought so obvious that it felt profound.

    Perhaps transcendence had never been hiding in the Volkswagen van.

    Perhaps it had been sitting quietly at this coffee-shop table all along.

  • Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every Day Feels Like an Arm-Wrestling Match with Sin

    Every day it feels as though I wake up to an arm-wrestling match with sin. Don’t feel sorry for me. I’m an addict. What am I addicted to? That’s a stupid question. The better question is what am I not addicted to? In any event, that’s not the point of the story just yet. The point is that there are tens of millions of us. I know I’m not special. My life is defined by the constant challenge to overcome vice, corruption, and the habits that make it nearly impossible for me to forgive myself for being the wretched and loathsome individual that I am. 

    But forgive myself I must. Forgiveness is the only way I can mend my broken self. Forgiveness is a commitment to become someone different from the recalcitrant sinner that fills my life with regret. 

    Some say I am too hard on myself, but they are mistaken because once I understood that life is a continual test of character, the stakes became much higher. Every day presents opportunities to choose integrity over temptation, discipline over indulgence, and virtue over vice.

    To be honest, however, there is something discouraging about viewing life as a daily battle against temptation. I cannot always defeat sin in an arm-wrestling match. Even on my best days, victory is incomplete. If I overcome temptation half the time, I still fail the other half. The prospect can feel exhausting. How can I forgive myself if I remain locked in a struggle I never fully win? How can I live with peace if temptation is always waiting and I never know whether I will emerge victorious?

    The answer may be that the object of forgiveness is not perfection but perseverance. The purpose of self-forgiveness is not to transform me into a flawless person. It is to transform me into a person who continues striving toward the good despite repeated failures. The measure of my character is not whether temptation disappears, but whether I continue returning to the fight. Forgiveness allows me to rise after every fall rather than define myself by the fall itself. The truly unforgivable life is not the life marked by failure. It is the life that abandons the struggle altogether.

    Of course, talk is cheap. Character is revealed through action, not rhetoric. And modern life has become extraordinarily efficient at encouraging surrender.

    You can retreat into a climate-controlled cocoon furnished with streaming services, snack foods, delivery apps, and algorithmically engineered distractions. You can spend years drifting from one dopamine hit to the next while the world applauds your consumption and politely asks if you would like another. Temptation no longer lurks in dark alleys. It arrives in bright packaging and offers free shipping.

    The world will not object if you quit the struggle. On the contrary, it will happily assist you. Fresh temptations will appear on your phone, your television, your computer, and eventually your doorstep. At some point, however, a terrible realization emerges. You are no longer directing your life. Your cravings are directing it for you.

    At that moment, you cease to be the protagonist of your own story. You become a supporting character in a drama written by your appetites, a bit player taking orders from every craving that wanders onto the stage. Perhaps you will grow numb to this reality and drift into a comfortable spiritual death, cushioned by convenience, entertained into submission, and surrounded by enough snacks and streaming content to dull any remaining sense of alarm. Or perhaps the discomfort will refuse to leave. Perhaps it will linger like a splinter in the soul. Perhaps it will haunt you until the life you have built begins to resemble a horror movie disguised as a luxury resort.

    That haunting may prove to be a gift. It may force you to confront the fact that you have been living in your own version of the Sunken Place, sinking ever deeper into passivity while your impulses seize control of the steering wheel. The tragedy is not that temptation exists. The tragedy is that you have mistaken indulgence for freedom and captivity for comfort. At some point, if you are fortunate, a voice will break through the fog. It will not whisper. It will not negotiate. It will issue a command as urgent as any ever spoken in a Jordan Peele horror film:

    Get out.

  • Gimpel in the Age of Clout

    Gimpel in the Age of Clout

    During the last several months, I have found myself thinking about a word that appears everywhere in the manosphere and influencer culture: clout. The word carries the scent of raw power and money. It implies that deception, manipulation, and cleverness are not merely acceptable but admirable, provided they produce influence. The idea depresses me because the merchants of clout often succeed. They accumulate followers by the millions, preaching a form of practical nihilism in which visibility becomes the highest good. Every religion has its devil, and the devil of clout has an opposite: obscurity. In the attention economy, we possess endless metrics for measuring who matters and who does not. Once we accept those metrics, we become captives of a grotesque vision of optimization. As I contemplate this folly, I find myself haunted by Isaac Bashevis Singer’s short story Gimpel the Fool.

    Gimpel is an orphan, a misfit, and a lovable man-child wandering the streets of Frampol. He possesses a sweetness so genuine that it appears almost supernatural. The townspeople, by contrast, pride themselves on their irony, cynicism, and cleverness. Because Gimpel is trusting, they become addicted to deceiving him. They lie to him, mock him, trick him, and turn him into a public spectacle whenever the opportunity presents itself. His innocence functions like catnip for the town’s cruelty.

    Gimpel’s only true ally is the rabbi, who insists that Gimpel is no fool at all. The real fools are those who delight in evil and humiliation. They mistake malice for intelligence. Gimpel, on the other hand, radiates goodness. Singer’s story repeatedly suggests that goodness and foolishness are not the same thing, even if the world often confuses them.

    When Gimpel expresses a desire to leave town, he is persuaded to marry Elka, who turns out to be the exact opposite of the pure and virtuous maiden he has been promised. Elka openly admits she is no innocent, yet demands that she be treated with dignity. Gimpel agrees, and they marry. Before long, Elka gives birth to a child that is plainly not his.

    Yet Gimpel loves the boy anyway. He devotes himself to the child and gradually comes to love Elka as well. His devotion is not rewarded. Elka treats him with contempt. While he works, she entertains other men and continually rejects his attempts at affection. The rabbi urges Gimpel to divorce her, but he cannot bring himself to do it. Instead, he continues supporting Elka and her children with money, food, and patience.

    For twenty years he remains loyal to a woman who repeatedly betrays him. Elka eventually bears six children, none of whom appear to be his. Then she falls ill and dies. Her final request is simple: that Gimpel forgive her. Reflecting on her life, he imagines her summing it up with a bleak confession: “I deceived Gimpel. That was the meaning of my brief life.”

    After her death, the Spirit of Evil visits Gimpel and offers him a tempting form of revenge. The townspeople have mocked him his entire life. Why not repay them? Why not urinate in the bakery’s bread dough and feed them corruption disguised as nourishment? When Gimpel hesitates, the spirit mocks his faith. There is no God, it says. There is no judgment. There is no meaning. The world is nothing but a swamp of lies. Seduced by resentment, Gimpel finally gives in and contaminates the dough.

    The act immediately wounds his conscience. Soon afterward, Elka appears to him in a dream. Wrapped in a burial shroud, she asks a single question: “What have you done, Gimpel?” He tries to blame her for his anger and bitterness, but she rejects the excuse. Her life may have been false, she tells him, but that does not mean all of life is false. She reveals that her deceptions have led her into profound suffering after death. When Gimpel looks at her face, he sees it consumed by darkness. The vision shocks him awake.

    Terrified by what he has done, Gimpel gathers the loaves and buries them in a chasm before anyone can eat them.

    Then he leaves Frampol.

    He gives provisions to his children and becomes a wanderer, drifting from place to place. Along the way he discovers that the world is overflowing with lies, yet no lie remains hidden forever. Every deception eventually reveals a truth. Every fraud leaves a trail. Even dreams become witnesses against those who seek to escape reality.

    As he travels, Gimpel accumulates stories. He learns that humanity is capable of every vice imaginable and that today’s absurdity often becomes tomorrow’s reality. Yet he also discovers that people hunger for meaning. They crave stories because stories impose order on a world that frequently resembles chaos. Gimpel becomes a storyteller, and audiences gather around him because his tales help them navigate a universe that often seems abandoned to cynicism and nihilism.

    In old age, he still dreams of Elka. He remembers her betrayals, but he remembers her with tenderness rather than bitterness. It is as though the generosity of his own heart gradually redeems her memory. The woman who spent her life deceiving him becomes, in recollection, the woman she might have been.

    The story ends with Gimpel reflecting that the world itself may be a kind of illusion. We may be little more than shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave. Yet Singer’s point is not that truth is unattainable. It is that truth exists beyond our distortions. We are always one breath away from a more real world. The response to deception is not greater deception. The response to nihilism is not surrender. We must live with goodness, integrity, and faith. Otherwise, in our pursuit of clout, cleverness, and self-interest, we become the fools we imagined ourselves too sophisticated to be.

  • The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    The Sin of Outsourcing Humanity

    For Tyler Austin Harper, there is only one word that captures the gravity of dehumanization: sin. And to be clear, dehumanization is rampant—in the form of robot companions, digital girlfriends, and AI therapists. To call these developments merely wrong is an understatement. He writes, “They feel to me like something deeper and darker.” In his essay “There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI: It’s Sin,” Harper argues that to understand the depths of what is happening to us, we need Christian guides because Christianity provides a framework for understanding dehumanization. You cannot understand dehumanization unless you first understand what it means to be fully human. Harper turns to Christian critics of AI to trace this trajectory from human to subhuman through the misuse of technology.

    These misuses emerge when people overemphasize the business, pragmatic, and utilitarian uses of AI at the expense of humanity, a Faustian bargain as old as sin itself. To champion technology and “outsource the most interesting aspects of our life and labor to machines” without considering the effects on the human soul is to threaten human dignity and meaning.

    Christianity frames us as fallen creatures who long to return to our Maker. The burden of being human is struggling with our fallen nature and seeking grace through God. When we look to machines for salvation, we outsource the burden of what it means to be human. In doing so, we forget that this burden entails suffering and that suffering itself can be a gift from God, pointing us toward humility and the true path. In Harper’s words, “Christianity has a clear ‘anthropological vision,’ asserting that the purpose of the human species is to exist in the image of its creator, to love God and one another, and to spread life on Earth and steward its creatures.” To move toward this purpose is to become fully human. We conform to God and fulfill our humanity. Conforming ourselves to machines, by contrast, becomes a desecration of what it means to be human.

    Harper argues that outside the Christian framework, we become confused about what it means to be human in the first place. He writes, “Many secular thinkers can struggle to articulate a clear definition of what humanity is.” He points to Christian writer Carl Trueman, who observes that the term dehumanization loses its force if the secular definition of humanization remains an “empty cipher.” Secularists and techno-believers have reduced humanization to a narrow set of superficial behaviors that fail to capture what it truly means to carry the burden of having a soul.

    Harper describes himself as “a not especially observant Presbyterian” and is not arguing that we must embrace religious orthodoxy to “fully appreciate the challenge posed by the rise of AI.” However, he insists that we “must start from the premise that humans have some kind of universal nature or essence that must be safeguarded from technological encroachment.”

    Harper’s article reminds me of the dangers of Liquid Modernity, a concept developed by Zygmunt Bauman. Bauman describes a social condition in which stable institutions, identities, relationships, careers, moral frameworks, and communities dissolve into constant flux, instability, and adaptation. In the context of dehumanization and the rise of AI, Liquid Modernity refers to the transformation of human beings from rooted persons with durable social bonds into endlessly flexible, data-driven consumers and performers who must continuously reinvent themselves to survive technological and economic disruption.

    Societies that lack a tradition defining humanization may ultimately surrender to the doctrine that Liquid Modernity is both desirable and inevitable—a condition in which human beings outsource the burden of being human to machines.

  • The Lost Men of Hobcallow

    The Lost Men of Hobcallow

    At first, my colleagues in the small town generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance.” I was a young Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrived three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight navy blue Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in velveteen Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells? 

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    By the time the English Department Chair, Moses Okoro, finally called me into his office, his patience had clearly evaporated. He looked at me not as one looks at a colleague, but as one studies a raccoon that has somehow wandered into a faculty meeting wearing cologne.

    I walked in, and there was Moses sitting behind his desk. His feet were ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering diaphanous green pirate shirt draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.” 

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the Hobcallow way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

    I was grateful I wasn’t fired. I drove back to my apartment and resolved to calibrate myself to the customs of this small desert town. Fresh off the bus from the bustling Bay Area, I found that being marooned in this sun-bleached corner of California had affected my judgment. Without any real friends and even fewer social obligations, I lived in more solitude than was good for my mental health. My one-bedroom apartment became my sanctuary—no roommates, no forced small talk, just me and the sweet luxury of never having to negotiate over chores or TV channels. My companions? A stack of CDs featuring Morrissey, The Smiths, Prefab Sprout, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, and other bands that sounded like a group therapy session for depressives. The soundtrack was perfect for a guy laboring over Hercu-Dome, my dystopian novel in which society punishes the overweight with Orwellian fervor for failing to meet state-mandated body standards.

    When I wasn’t writing, I’d plink away on my Yamaha ebony upright, conjuring up self-indulgent sonatas that only the most pretentious of muses could appreciate. I didn’t read music so much as I let it ooze out of me—luscious chords here, shameless glissandos there—while imagining some ethereal goddess materializing in my living room to stroke my ego as I struck a soulful pose.

    Next to my piano sat a small side table stacked with International Male and Urban Gear catalogs, glossy monuments to the theology of misguided masculinity. Their pages overflowed with men wearing mesh tank tops, leather pants, silk pirate shirts, and enough gold accessories to alarm a minor dictator. The models did not look like ordinary humans. They looked like nightclub mercenaries preparing to either seduce someone’s wife or overthrow a Caribbean government.

    To my twenty-seven-year-old mind, those catalogs were not merely selling clothes. They were sacred manuscripts revealing the hidden essence of manhood itself. Every page seemed to whisper the same intoxicating lie: You are only one aggressively unbuttoned shirt away from becoming irresistible.

    So I obeyed the catalogs with religious devotion.

    Month by month my wardrobe drifted further into the outer reaches of fashion psychosis until I eventually found myself teaching composition in semi-transparent pirate shirts that shimmered under fluorescent classroom lighting like the wardrobe of a disco-era vampire. At some point, my clothing ceased being “eccentric” and became an administrative concern. My boss had finally noticed that one of his English instructors appeared to be dressing for a yacht-rock cabaret.

    The message was clear: either the catalogs disappeared or my career might.

    And I needed that career desperately. Returning to the Bay Area was unthinkable. The cost of living there, combined with the savagery of the academic job market, had reduced me during graduate school to the economic status of a lost sailor surviving behind a seafood restaurant.

    Compared to the grim survivalism of my Bay Area college years, my Hobcallow apartment felt less like faculty housing and more like a reward package for a minor petrochemical monarch. The place had vaulted ceilings, sliding-glass shower doors, two swimming pools shimmering beneath the desert sun, a bubbling hot tub, and a laundry room so spotless and functional it felt imported from a Scandinavian utopia. Every afternoon the complex glowed with the tranquil confidence of a place where people drank white wine by the pool and casually discussed mutual funds.

    I would stand there in disbelief wondering whether I was a low-ranking composition instructor teaching comma splices to freshmen or an oil tycoon hiding from federal investigators.

    So settled in this desert hideaway, I now enjoyed a hint of the luxury I’d always been denied. On weekends, I tanned my lean, 195-pound frame by The Springs’ apartment pool. No real friendships blossomed at that pool—friendships are messy and overrated—but I did collect some acquaintances, a bizarre cast of lost souls who could only exist in this sun-scorched limbo.

    Chief among my apartment acquaintances was Leonard Skeazy, an attorney from Santa Monica who was lured out here by a fat signing bonus and a monogrammed office, yet couldn’t shake the resentment of having been exiled to this cultural wasteland. He was the sort of guy who treated “style” like a religion. He sported custom-made Speedos that were purchased at a specialty boutique in Santa Monica—yes, he would actually drive back to the city to replace them whenever the chlorinated pool water faded the jewel tones of his spandex. His long, curly hair and eerie blue eyes made him look like a lounge singer who never quite made it out of the Holiday Inn circuit.

    Leonard was a man of eccentric habits and questionable hygiene. Despite being well into his 30s, he clung to the bachelor dream of finding “the right girl,” although his standards seemed laughably out of place in a town where having a high school diploma was considered highbrow. This was a guy who’d lounge poolside for hours, skin glistening like a buttered croissant, all while blasting Kenny G from his boombox as if smooth jazz were somehow his secret weapon. His breath, tinged with the distinct aroma of last night’s Chardonnay, matched his penchant for sneaking sips from boxes of white wine he kept stashed in his fridge.

    Curiosity (and a lack of better options) led me to visit Leonard at his apartment one day. It was a bachelor pad in the most tragic sense. Despite the fact that he was swimming in cash, his apartment was as bare as a prison cell. The living room housed only a lone couch, a TV balanced on cinder blocks, and—wait for it—an ironing board. Apparently, ironing his endless supply of gaudy silk ties was the only domestic task he took seriously. The walls were completely devoid of art or decor, just barren expanses of beige that made the flickering TV light cast ghostly shadows over the snake-like drape of his ties.

    His bedroom was even more pitiful: no dresser, no closet system—just three open suitcases serving as makeshift storage. It was as if he refused to fully unpack, a subconscious protest against ever settling into this armpit of a town. The fridge, naturally, was a barren tundra except for—what else—more boxes of white wine. Here was a man who had chased the scent of money into the middle of nowhere, only to refuse to acknowledge he’d actually arrived. Leonard was a ghost of himself, haunting his own life, clinging to the notion that he was just “visiting” until he could escape back to the big city. 

    What kind of man, I wondered, gets seduced by a fat paycheck only to spend his days living in a self-imposed purgatory, where the only things thriving are his excuses and his growing collection of faded Speedos? I suppose it was easier for Leonard to pretend he was just passing through than to face the fact that he’d become a permanent fixture in this desolate corner of nowhere, a relic clinging to the fading glamour of a life he never truly had.

    My second poolside companion was Roland Beavers. He was the type of poolside companion that nightmares are made of. Imagine, if you will, a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that seemed perpetually annoyed at its presence. His physique was more doughy than daring, his chin seemingly having taken an early retirement. And yet, this fine specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in a pair of lava-red terry cloth trunks so undersized that they clung to his hips for dear life, revealing a set of stretchmarks that looked like they’d been painted on by a vengeful graffiti artist. Roland, of course, had an explanation ready for anyone who dared make eye contact long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Oh, they weren’t the result of his love affair with powdered donuts. They were the battle scars from his days as a world-class daredevil, hurling himself off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he regaled them with his tales of high-flying heroics. 

    But Roland’s true calling wasn’t acrobatics; it was unsolicited public broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d park himself by the pool and provide live commentary on every “news bit” that caught his eye, apparently under the delusion that everyone within a 20-foot radius was breathlessly awaiting his next headline. His audience, meanwhile, mumbled curses under their breath, desperately wishing he’d take up a hobby that didn’t involve public speaking. Maybe knitting—somewhere indoors. Roland’s social cluelessness reached its peak when playful couples would toss a football or frisbee in the water. For Roland, this wasn’t a game he could just watch; it was an invitation. He’d leap into the pool with all the grace of a boulder, wading into their game like an uninvited ghost at a family reunion. The couples, now robbed of their carefree fun, would give him the kind of look reserved for people who talk during movies before stomping off in search of a Roland-free zone. 

    And heaven help the women trying to sunbathe in peace. Roland, ever the gentleman, took it upon himself to offer his “services” to any woman within spraying distance. Whether it was spritzing their backs with a pump bottle of water or offering to rub sunscreen on their shoulders, Roland never missed an opportunity to “help,” oblivious to the fact that his mere presence was enough to ruin their entire tanning experience.

    Of course, these endless days at the pool weren’t just for Roland’s entertainment; they were an extension of his bizarre domestic life. His mother, Nadine, a woman who looked like she could bench-press a Buick, frequently leaned over the balcony of their apartment—muu-muu billowing in the desert wind—barking orders at Roland to “slather on more sunscreen.” With her hair twisted into tight curls that looked like they might pop loose at any moment and neck veins throbbing like they were signaling an SOS, Nadine’s concern for her son was a constant, vocal presence. “Get inside and eat something, Roland! You’re wasting away!” she’d holler, seemingly unaware that Roland had about 40 extra pounds he could “waste away” without anyone noticing.

    You’d think with all this doting and nagging, Roland might be motivated to get a job, maybe contribute something to society—anything to give the rest of us a break. But alas, Roland and Nadine were comfortably cushioned by the settlement from a lawsuit stemming from Roland’s failed attempt at flight school in San Diego. Apparently, the other students in the dorm took one look at Roland’s face and decided it needed to be rearranged, leaving him with a fractured skull and a big fat check to sit around and bother the rest of us for the rest of his natural life.

    And so there he was—our unwanted poolside companion—who, thanks to his mother’s coddling and that lawsuit cash, was free to spend his days lounging in his ridiculous red trunks, delivering headlines no one asked for, and making our lives just a little more unbearable, one stretch mark at a time.

    My third pool acquaintance was Julian French, a man whose very existence seemed to be a tribute act to Paul McCartney. He was one of those poolside characters you couldn’t make up if you tried. In his late thirties, Julian’s resemblance to the legendary Beatle was so uncanny that you’d swear he moonlighted as a Paul McCartney impersonator in some dingy Las Vegas lounge, crooning “Hey Jude” to half-asleep tourists. He had it all: the same nose, mouth, chin, and those forlorn, droopy eyes that looked like they’d seen every heartbreak in the world. He even rocked the signature McCartney hair—a feathered mullet straight out of 1978, perfectly coiffed and well-maintained, despite the sweltering desert heat.

    However, Julian was no rock god. No, he was a tad shorter, pudgier, and carried a complexion that looked like a battlefield of acne scars. Despite his flaws, Julian clung to his resemblance to McCartney like a man hanging off a cliff by his fingernails. His routine was as stale as a week-old scone: he’d slink into clubs in his black “Beatles jacket,” leaning against the bar with a half-grin that screamed, Yes, I know I look like Paul McCartney—please, someone, state the obvious. And sure enough, some tipsy woman would eventually stumble over, eyes wide with wonder, to ask, “Has anyone ever told you…?”

    For Julian, the club scene was nothing more than a factory line. The pick-up process was practically automated. His biggest challenge was pretending that he wasn’t bored out of his skull by the whole charade. He had to feign surprise when the 397th woman in the last year commented on his uncanny resemblance, as if she were the first brilliant soul to make this connection. In truth, Julian’s brain had checked out a long time ago, letting his face and “brand” do all the heavy lifting.

    As I got to know him better at the pool, Julian dropped a bombshell that was as ridiculous as it was tragic. His real name was Michael Barley. “Julian French” was the result of a rebranding, like he was a faded lounge act looking to stage a comeback. And, of course, this wasn’t enough for our wannabe rock star. With his newly minted name and delusional dreams of fame, he’d taken off for London, where he could really “sell” his phony British accent and Paul McCartney shtick. Unfortunately, London wasn’t buying what he was selling, and after job rejections galore, he skulked back to Hobcallow, tail between his legs.

    He couldn’t move back with his parents. They lived in a trailer home connected to an elementary school, where his father was the janitor by day and a roving locksmith by night. Understandably ashamed, Julian decided he needed to put some distance between himself and his parents’ modest living conditions. 

    But what really terrified him wasn’t the trailer—it was the slow, creeping realization that time was catching up with him. As his face got puffier and rounder, the once-proud resemblance to Paul McCartney was fading fast. Panic-stricken, Julian moved out, took a job at a local car dealership, and tried desperately to cling to the last remnants of his “Beatles glory.”

    When I met him, “Julian French” was an aging caricature, still clinging to his faux-British accent, still hoping that someone, anyone, would recognize the rock star lurking beneath his diminishing resemblance. But deep down, he knew the truth: every year, he looked less and less like McCartney and more like a guy who spends his days bumming around a used car lot and his nights reminiscing about the days when he could walk into a club and have women flock to him. Time, like the receding hairline of a rock legend, is a cruel thief.

    With my three poolside companions, my downgraded wardrobe of intentionally boring clothing, and the illusion of stable employment, I gradually settled into a manageable rhythm at that tiny desert outpost. Hobcallow had begun to feel survivable. I imagined myself lingering there indefinitely, teaching freshman composition beneath the brown haze of desert sunsets while slowly calcifying into one more eccentric faculty fossil.

    Then came the bathroom incident.

    I was seated upon the porcelain throne in the sacred solitude of the faculty restroom, pants resting around my ankles in the universal posture of human vulnerability. In my hands sat a copy of Escape from Freedom, whose pages I was reading with the serene concentration of a monk seeking enlightenment through bowel regularity. For one glorious moment, I believed myself alone.

    Then the atmosphere shifted.

    First came the smell: an aggressive cloud of talcum powder battling unsuccessfully against decades of cigarette smoke. Then came the sound—that unmistakable emphysemic wheeze like an accordion being crushed beneath a pickup truck. Even before I saw her, I knew.

    Scary Mary.

    Mary was one of Hobcallow’s permanent academic phantoms, a forty-year-old perpetual student who had wandered the campus for over a decade accumulating grievances, dropped classes, and nicotine residue. She moved through the college like a bureaucratic poltergeist, dragging behind her a neon-pink luggage cart overloaded with tote bags, paperwork, and unresolved hostility toward authority.

    “Mary,” I said from inside the stall, already exhausted by her existence, “I know it’s you. You need to leave immediately.”

    “Professor McMahon,” came her gravelly chain-smoker rasp, “I need to talk to you about my grade.”

    There are few sentences in the English language less welcome than those words spoken through the door of a men’s restroom stall.

    “Mary,” I replied, “this is the men’s room. I could have campus police arrest you. Leave now.”

    But Mary possessed the survival instincts of a cockroach crawling through radioactive fallout. “Not until you explain why I got a C.”

    As though we were calmly discussing educational philosophy over herbal tea rather than conducting a hostage negotiation through a bathroom partition.

    “We can discuss your grade in my office.”

    But reason had no jurisdiction over Scary Mary.

    A moment later, her long nicotine-yellowed fingers appeared over the top of the stall divider, clutching the partition like a low-budget horror villain scaling castle walls. I stared upward in disbelief as she climbed atop her ridiculous tower of pink luggage until her skeletal, sweating face slowly emerged above the divider like an exhausted demon materializing from a nicotine-scented dimension.

    “You need to help me, Professor,” she wheezed between labored breaths. “I can’t fail this class again.”

    At that point I rose, fully dressed now, vibrating with the fury of a man whose sacred bathroom ritual had been catastrophically violated.

    “You want to know why you got a C, Mary?” I snapped. “Fine. Your incoherent fifth-grade chicken scratch is so catastrophically unreadable it makes me question the entire mission of higher education.”

    Mary recoiled as though slapped. Her cavernous eyes locked onto mine with reptilian stillness.

    “You’re a terrible person,” she hissed. “This isn’t over.”

    Then physics intervened.

    Attempting to descend from her unstable luggage-cart fortress, Mary lost her footing and toppled forward in spectacular slow motion, collapsing onto the restroom floor like a sack of broomsticks hurled from a second-story window. She immediately began writhing and shrieking about a dislocated shoulder. Whether she was genuinely injured or merely auditioning for another campus grievance remained unclear.

    I exited the stall, washed my hands with the eerie calmness of a man nearing psychological collapse, and stared down at the wreckage sprawled across the tile floor.

    “Aren’t you going to help me?” she whimpered.

    Something strange overtook me then. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps heatstroke. Perhaps prolonged exposure to Hobcallow had finally dissolved the last functioning portions of my judgment.

    “I can do better than help you up,” I announced. “I can fix your shoulder.”

    Her eyes widened with desperate hope.

    “You can?”

    “Absolutely. My brother dislocated his shoulder during a soccer championship. I watched the coach pop it back in.”

    This was technically true in the same way watching a documentary qualifies someone to perform open-heart surgery.

    I grabbed her wrist with both hands and yanked with the reckless confidence of a man operating entirely outside the boundaries of professional liability. Mary screamed loud enough to alarm neighboring departments.

    Then suddenly she blinked in astonishment.

    “Oh my God,” she gasped. “You fixed it.”

    “I know,” I replied, with the casual arrogance of a frontier doctor amputating limbs beside a whiskey barrel.

    Mary slowly rose to her feet, rubbing her shoulder with renewed determination.

    “Mr. McMahon?”

    “Yes, Mary?”

    “I have to pass your class whether you like it or not.”

    I stared at her, too exhausted to fully process the sentence.

    “Yes,” I sighed. “That does remain a theoretical possibility.”

    Relieved that I had somehow escaped arrest, litigation, or exorcism, I headed toward class assuming the nightmare had finally ended.

    The next morning, however, I was summoned to Moses’s office for what the message described as “an urgent matter,” a phrase that in academic life usually means someone has either filed a complaint, discovered a budget shortfall, or decided that your continued employment is an unnecessary luxury.

    Moses was slumped in his leather chair, wearing the grave expression of a man preparing to deliver bad news while also protecting himself from liability.

    “Have you heard?” he asked.

    I shook my head.

    “I received a call from Charlene Johnson, editor of The Hobcallow Chronicle. Her boyfriend is Mary’s brother. He’s not happy.”

    “Mary barged into the men’s room,” I said.

    Moses raised both hands, palms out, as if calming a hostage negotiator. “I’m sure she did. And believe me, you are not the first instructor she has pursued into inappropriate architectural spaces.”

    He paused, letting the institutional fog thicken.

    “But you didn’t handle it in the most ideal way.”

    “She climbed over a bathroom stall.”

    “Yes,” Moses said, with the weary diplomacy of a man who had long ago surrendered to absurdity. “And that was unfortunate. But her brother is a captain in the Hobcallow Police Department, and according to Charlene, he feels your remarks were unusually insulting. Unprecedented, even. Cruel.”

    “She invaded my personal space while I was half-naked and reading Erich Fromm.”

    Moses extended one arm to silence me, the way a priest might halt a drunk parishioner before a wedding toast. “Cruelty has no place in this department.”

    I stared at him. This was academia at its purest: a woman could scale a restroom stall like a nicotine-stained gargoyle, but my tone had apparently violated community standards.

    “If that weren’t enough,” Moses continued, “this morning I received a memo about budget cuts.”

    He stopped and gazed at a framed photograph from the previous year’s department picnic, where several instructors stood around a folding table of potato salad, unaware they were being documented for future elegies.

    “Lecturer positions,” he said, “will be the first to go.”

    “So I’m out,” I said. “Because Scary Mary launched a bathroom assault and I failed to respond with sufficient pastoral tenderness.”

    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We may have a solution.”

    He picked up a copy of The Hobcallow Chronicle, cleared his throat, and leaned back in his chair with the solemn theatricality of a frontier judge about to sentence a horse thief.

    “One of my primary responsibilities,” he said, “is keeping lecturers employed in good times and bad. In bad times, we must become innovative. We must demonstrate our value to the community.”

    I nodded, performing the expression of a man who understood the moral urgency of public relations.

    “I’ve been working with Charlene,” Moses said, “to generate positive visibility for the university.”

    “You mean Charlene, the newspaper editor who is dating Mary’s brother, the police captain.”

    “Yes,” he said, as if this were merely an interesting footnote and not a cartel of small-town leverage forming around my throat.

    “Charlene and I have developed a way for you to preserve your job. In addition to your teaching duties, you will intervene with local citizens and help them find their true path.”

    “Their true path?”

    “Yes. And I already have someone in mind.”

    I felt the room tilt.

    “The good news,” Moses said, “is that you know him.”

    “Please don’t say Roland Beavers.”

    “Roland Beavers.”

    My stomach dropped through the floor and continued downward toward the earth’s molten core. Roland Beavers was a local cautionary tale wrapped in too-small swim trunks, a man-child whose existence seemed designed to test the outer limits of civic compassion.

    Moses brightened, mistaking my horror for engagement.

    “Roland has certain learning deficits that have prevented him from advancing here at the university. You, my friend, are going to help him.”

    “Does Roland even know how to read?”

    “I would assume nothing,” Moses said, his patience thinning. “But you will teach him grammar, sentence structure, paragraph development—the works. Think of it as mechanical repair. You open the hood, remove the corroded parts, and install something functional.”

    “I’m not known for remediation.”

    “No one is known for remediation,” Moses snapped. “Remediation is tedious, dirty work. It’s like scrubbing mildew off a shower curtain. But someone has to do it, and since you already know Roland, you are the ideal candidate.”

    “Oh, I know him.”

    Moses leaned forward, his eyes narrowing with administrative intensity.

    “You tutor this poor fellow—the sad sack who washed out of aviation school—and turn him into something passable. Then Charlene can run a human-interest feature: ‘Local Professor Helps Troubled Man Rise Above.’ You become not merely a lecturer but an asset. A community figure. An educator with a heart.”

    “A heart that apparently must beat inside a hostage situation.”

    “It might save your job.”

    The room went quiet.

    “Can I at least think it over?” I asked.

    “You have until lunch,” Moses said. “After that, I have a budget meeting where we decide which lecturers get renewed and which ones get released into the desert. Rumor is the cuts may be brutal.”

    And just like that, the full weight of Hobcallow’s budget crisis landed on my shoulders, where it sat beside an even stranger burden: my professional survival now depended on whether I could teach Roland Beavers to assemble a coherent sentence without injuring either of us.

    After being strong-armed by Moses into an unwanted mentorship arrangement that sounded less like education and more like court-ordered rehabilitation, I stormed home fueled by equal parts resentment, panic, and wounded pride. My academic career now appeared to hinge on whether I could somehow transform Roland Beavers—a human caution sign in swim trunks—into a functioning college student.

    I collapsed into my apartment trying to process the catastrophe while contemplating dinner, which at that moment consisted of opening yet another can of tuna and chewing on a raw green pepper with the grim enthusiasm of a prisoner preserving muscle mass in solitary confinement. The whole meal radiated culinary despair. It was not food so much as nutritional surrender.

    Then came the knock at the door.

    I opened it to find Nadine Beavers herself standing in the hallway like a floral-print apparition from the Church of Aggressive Hospitality. She wore her trademark muu-muu exploding with tropical flowers so loud and oversized it looked less like clothing and more like upholstery liberated from a Hawaiian casino lounge. In her arms she carried two steaming casserole dishes with the solemnity of a woman delivering diplomatic aid to a war-torn nation.

    “I heard my son might have the privilege of having you as his personal mentor and tutor,” she said with a sheepish grin.

    Then she gave a strange little snort, as though we were about to enter a backroom gambling arrangement involving counterfeit casino chips and emotional dependency.

    “Figured it’d be nice to get to know what we’re getting into.”

    Before I could respond, she swept past me and deposited the dishes onto my kitchen table with a heavy thud that shook the silverware drawer. One contained a taco casserole radiating molten cheese, cumin, and enough grease to lubricate industrial machinery. The other was a strawberry pie glistening beneath fluorescent lights like a sacred object worshipped by Midwestern church communities.

    The smell alone nearly brought me to tears. Moments earlier I had been preparing to gnaw through dry tuna and uncooked peppers like a survivalist trapped in a nuclear bunker. Now my apartment smelled like human warmth, butter, melted cheese, and the kind of reckless carbohydrate optimism capable of derailing entire diet plans.

    Nadine looked around my apartment with the relaxed confidence of a woman who had already decided she belonged there.

    “Well,” she said, placing both hands on her hips, “if you’re gonna save Roland’s future, you sure as hell aren’t doing it on canned fish.”

    I stood there, transfixed, as she lifted the lid off the taco casserole. The scent alone hit me like a punch—layers of melted cheese, crisped to perfection, with seasoned meat, beans, and salsa bubbling underneath. My stomach growled so loudly it could’ve been mistaken for a Harley-Davidson revving up. Each bubble of cheese seemed to mock my restraint, daring me to dive in. As she unveiled the casserole, I could almost hear the crunch of tortilla chips mingling with that gooey, cheesy goodness. This wasn’t just dinner—it was an emotional rollercoaster masquerading as comfort food.

    But Nadine wasn’t done yet. With the precision of someone handling a priceless artifact, she slowly peeled back the foil from the strawberry pie. The crinkling foil built up anticipation like a suspenseful thriller. Underneath was a glossy, vibrant pie that looked more like a work of art than a dessert. The strawberries were arranged like they’d been hand-placed by a food stylist—gleaming, ruby-red slices sitting in a pool of sweet glaze, nestled within a buttery, golden crust. The smell was an olfactory hug, a heady mix of fresh fruit and pastry that all but made my knees buckle. I could practically taste the sweet-tangy perfection before even lifting a fork. Nadine caught me eyeing the pie with the kind of longing usually reserved for forbidden love and nudged me with a knowing smirk. “Don’t be afraid of it—dig in.”

    With a fork now in hand and no semblance of dignity left, I heaped a mountain of casserole onto my plate and pretended to listen to Nadine recount her son’s tragic life story. I’d already heard every miserable detail directly from Roland himself, who repeated the narrative so often it was like he was auditioning for a reality show nobody wanted to watch. But I knew the price of good food—feigned interest and patience. So I nodded along, punctuating her monologue with sympathetic “hmm”s and “ah”s while internally counting down to dessert.

    That’s when she dropped the real bombshell: Roland was currently sprawled out on their couch nursing a black eye, the result of getting “fresh” with some guy’s girlfriend at the pool. According to Nadine, Roland’s brilliant strategy involved spraying her with water and then trying to join in on a playful water fight—clearly a move that went over about as well as a lead balloon. The girlfriend’s boyfriend solved the problem with his fist, and now Roland was sidelined with a bag of ice and bruised ego.

    “He has no common sense,” Nadine lamented. “I don’t know what to do with him. The psychologist at the university said he needs a mentor, and your boss thinks that could be you.”

    I choked a little on my casserole. “To be truthful, I’ve never mentored anyone before.”

    Nadine’s expression turned serious. “But you’re a teacher—an educator. And you live right here. Do you know how convenient that is? My boy doesn’t like to venture far from home.”

    I tried to explain that this was more of a job for a trained psychologist, but she waved me off like I was suggesting something as outlandish as skydiving lessons. “Forget that. You mentor him, and you’ll be doing some fine eating around here. Am I clear?”

    At that point, I took a bite of the strawberry pie, and whatever resolve I’d clung to dissolved faster than the buttery, flaky crust. The explosion of sweet, tart berries wrapped in velvety smoothness was nothing short of divine intervention. “It’s outstanding,” I said, my voice laced with an awe that was embarrassing for a grown man. “Honestly, it’s the best meal I’ve had in longer than I care to admit.”

    Nadine leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms with the satisfaction of a mafia boss whose offer you can’t refuse. “There’s a reason I’ve been the chair of the Crust and Crumble Club for the last twenty years. People respect excellence in a leader, and pie-making is no different.” She allowed herself a self-satisfied smirk, the kind that made it clear she knew she had me wrapped around her flour-dusted finger.

    “There’s more where that came from if you agree to help my boy,” she continued, her voice silky with unspoken promises. “You’ll love mentoring Roland. The two of you will become great friends. And you could do a lot worse than enjoying homemade taco casserole, extra-cheesy, and an endless stream of pies in your corner. Stability, comfort, and good eats—what else do you need in this God-forsaken desert?”

    I surveyed the spread before me—a smorgasbord of all-American excess, the kind of food that made you forget your troubles until the heartburn kicked in. There was no denying it—I had been bought out by casseroles and confectionery. 

    Seduced by comforting casseroles and fruit pies and terrified of unemployment, I began my tutorials with Roland Beavers. Roland would roll up to my apartment like some kind of culinary Santa Claus, lugging casseroles, chili, cornbread, or a spaghetti feast—all meant to bribe me into pretending we were engaging in serious academic work. These sessions were a farce, a charade we both went along with because, honestly, who says no to free food?

    Moses, in his infinite wisdom (read: desperation), had armed me with a stack of sixth-grade workbooks to use with Roland, presumably to inch him toward literacy. But Roland’s visits were less about learning and more about napping on my couch. He’d complain of headaches after writing half of a paragraph and declare himself “famished” just as he was about to grasp the complexities of a compound sentence. The guy had a black belt in avoidance. Before I knew it, he’d polished off the very dinner his mother had cooked for me, slumped into a food coma, and settled in to watch the Angels game from first pitch to final out. Or he’d watch with fascination the diet guru Suan Powter with her buzzcut shout the merits of lentils on her infomercial where her call to “stop the insanity” seemed to be encouraging her own maniacal demon to flourish. The set was a minimalist nightmare: harsh lighting, white walls, and an audience of desperate souls hanging on her every word. And then there were the graphics—big, bold letters flashing “CUT THE FAT!” and “EAT RIGHT NOW!”—just in case her voice alone wasn’t enough to drill the message into your brain. Every so often, she’d grab a cardboard cutout of the food pyramid and tear it apart like she was dismantling a corrupt regime. By then, I was grading essays and wondering how I’d ended up in this ridiculous parody of a mentorship program.

    It didn’t take long to see that trying to whip Roland into academic shape was like trying to sculpt marble out of a melting ice cream cone. The guy simply didn’t have the drive—or, frankly, the capacity—for discipline. I wasn’t about to carry him up the mountain of success while he sat back and asked for snack breaks. My philosophy was simple: everyone climbs their own mountains. If Roland wanted to remain at base camp eating cornbread, that was his prerogative. My job was to reach the summit of my own ambitions, not drag dead weight up a hill.

    For reasons I never fully understood, Roland regarded my apartment less as a place of study and more as a federally protected sleep sanctuary. He’d lumber through the front door, collapse onto my couch with the tragic relief of a Civil War soldier returning from battle, and within thirty seconds begin snoring with the industrial fury of malfunctioning logging equipment.

    Fortunately, this arrangement worked beautifully for me.

    Officially, I was tutoring Roland Beavers. In reality, I was grading freshman essays while a California Angels game murmured in the background and Roland—Hobcallow’s reigning emperor of arrested development—vibrated my couch cushions with nasal acoustics powerful enough to register on seismographs in neighboring counties.

    The whole situation evolved into a kind of desert academic farce. Roland got a climate-controlled nap chamber safely removed from the watchful eye of his mother, Nadine. I received home-cooked meals from Nadine so enormous and buttery they could’ve qualified as agricultural subsidies. And Moses, architect of Hobcallow’s endless bureaucratic theater, got the appearance of community outreach and educational uplift.

    Nobody seemed particularly concerned that the actual tutoring had died months earlier. The remedial workbooks sat untouched on the coffee table like archaeological artifacts from a failed civilization. In Hobcallow, “tutoring” was less about literacy than optics. As long as someone could point toward two men occupying the same room with a pencil nearby, the program was considered a triumph of social progress.

    During one of our so-called tutorial sessions—which by that point consisted primarily of me grading freshman essays while Roland Beavers used my couch as a federally protected sleep sanctuary—I heard Leonard Skeazy downstairs engaged in yet another operatic confrontation with one of his ex-girlfriends. Leonard had cycled through so many public breakups that the apartment complex treated them like recurring holiday events, but this one possessed a darker voltage.

    The shouting escalated rapidly.

    I set down a stack of essays and walked to the window just in time to witness the spectacle unfolding beside the pool. Leonard and his ex stood nose-to-nose beneath the blistering Hobcallow sun, gesturing wildly like two failed Shakespearean actors performing divorce proceedings in a chlorine-scented amphitheater.

    Then she shoved him.

    Not hard enough to qualify as attempted murder, but with enough force to send Leonard stumbling sideways into the community newspaper rack. His body twisted awkwardly on impact, and he collapsed onto the pavement with a heavy, meaty thud that echoed across the courtyard. He immediately clutched his knee and began howling with such theatrical agony that it sounded less like physical pain and more like a wounded banshee auditioning for daytime television.

    The scream jolted Roland awake.

    He sprang from the couch in a panic, hair disheveled, eyes half-open, moving with the startled confusion of a tranquilized zoo animal suddenly hearing gunfire. By the time I reached the window again, Roland was already barreling down the stairs toward the growing crowd.

    Nadine Beavers had somehow arrived even faster.

    She stood over Leonard in her ever-present floral apron, which fluttered in the desert wind like the battle flag of aggressive maternal intervention. Her expression carried that uniquely Nadine combination of genuine compassion and total exasperation.

    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leonard!” she barked. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

    Yet beneath the irritation there was unmistakable concern. Nadine treated wounded narcissists the way battlefield nurses treat delirious soldiers: harshly, efficiently, and with just enough tenderness to keep them alive.

    Roland crouched beside Leonard and helped prop him upright while Nadine examined the swollen knee with surprising gentleness.

    “Serves you right for acting like a fool,” she muttered, though her hands moved carefully across the injury.

    Leonard blinked back tears, gasping dramatically like a fish dragged onto a dock.

    “They’re all against me,” he wheezed. “I’m the victim of character assassination.”

    “Character assassination, my foot,” Nadine snapped. “You’re the victim of your own stupidity. Now stop whining so we can get you standing before the whole complex starts charging admission.”

    By then a small crowd had gathered around the pool, drawn not by concern but by the ancient human instinct to witness public humiliation. Apartment complexes like ours functioned as low-budget Roman coliseums where everyone secretly hoped for spectacle as long as they themselves were not the ones bleeding beside the vending machines.

    With considerable effort—and enough groaning from Leonard to suggest emergency battlefield surgery—they managed to hoist him upright. Roland handled most of the lifting while Nadine hovered nearby like an overbearing but strangely competent vulture overseeing roadside trauma care.

    The crowd slowly dispersed, disappointed the entertainment had concluded without handcuffs, nudity, or visible bloodshed.

    And so Leonard Skeazy limped away between Roland and Nadine like a fallen dictator being evacuated after a failed coup. Behind him floated scattered laughter, muttered insults, and the faint echo of ridicule from the poolside audience. It was the perfect Hobcallow ending: in his endless quest to defend his reputation, Leonard had once again managed only to deepen the legend of his own ridiculousness.

    Watching the three of them disappear toward the Beavers’ apartment, I realized the entire scene possessed the surreal emotional texture of small-town desert mythology. Roland and Nadine, those unlikely knights in polyester armor, had waddled into action to rescue Hobcallow’s most shameless self-saboteur and carry him off for “first aid,” as though this were not merely another chapter in Leonard Skeazy’s endless cycle of vanity, collapse, and public humiliation.

    A few days after Leonard’s poolside collapse, I was standing at my apartment window one afternoon drinking burnt coffee while Roland Beavers snored on my couch with the unwavering commitment of a professional hibernating mammal. That was when I witnessed one of the strangest sights Hobcallow had yet produced—and this was a town with an alarmingly high tolerance for absurdity.

    Parked beneath one of the apartment carports sat an ancient Chevy truck overflowing with wooden crates of apricots, peaches, and nectarines. Emerging from the vehicle were Leonard Skeazy and Julian French.

    At first I didn’t recognize them.

    Both men were dressed in dirt-stained blue work jumpsuits, the kind worn by sanitation crews, orchard laborers, and minimum-security prison workers assigned roadside cleanup duty. Their expensive sunglasses and poolside vanity had vanished. Their faces were sun-darkened and strangely peaceful. Leonard no longer looked like a failed attorney clinging desperately to status. Julian no longer resembled a bankrupt salesman auditioning for yacht-club membership. Together they looked like two men who had wandered off a fruit collective somewhere outside Bakersfield.

    “Roland,” I said, staring through the blinds, “you need to wake up and explain to me why Leonard and Julian are dressed like migrant mechanics hauling peaches into your mother’s apartment.”

    Roland opened one eye with the tragic exhaustion of a man being interrupted during a medically necessary nap.

    “Oh,” he mumbled. “They work for my mom now.”

    I turned slowly toward him.

    “What happened to Leonard’s law career?”

    “He got fired,” Roland said calmly. “Work-code violations. Sexual harassment, I think.”

    “And Julian?”

    “Hadn’t made a commission in almost a year.”

    Roland closed his eyes again, clearly hoping this concluded the conversation so he could return to unconsciousness.

    “No, no, no,” I said. “You don’t get to fall back asleep after dropping information like that. What exactly do they do for your mother?”

    Roland shrugged.

    “Whatever she tells them to do. They’re basically her assistants.”

    Outside the window, Leonard and Julian continued unloading crates of fruit with serene concentration while Nadine directed operations from the apartment doorway like a floral-print field marshal overseeing wartime agricultural logistics.

    “How does she pay them?”

    “She has a budget,” Roland replied.

    “A budget for what?”

    “The Crust and Crumble Club.”

    He said this with such confidence that I nodded reflexively, pretending it made perfect sense when in reality my brain had begun short-circuiting. Somehow my two poolside acquaintances—once obsessed with image, status, and masculine prestige—had been absorbed into Nadine Beavers’s domestic empire and transformed into fruit-hauling assistants dressed like auto-body repairmen.

    Before I could process the full horror of the situation, the phone rang.

    It was Moses.

    And for once, the news was good.

    Apparently The Hobcallow Chronicle had run a glowing human-interest profile about my mentorship of Roland Beavers, portraying me as a compassionate educational savior guiding a local misfit toward literacy and redemption. The article had generated such favorable publicity—and coincided with a miraculous budgetary windfall—that Moses had successfully secured my tenure.

    There would, he informed me, be a celebration in my honor at the campus ale house.

    The following Friday, the Crust & Crumble Club transformed the ale house into a strange hybrid of retirement banquet, church social, and tropical nervous breakdown. Crepe-paper streamers sagged from the ceiling. Dollar-store balloons floated weakly above folding tables. Somewhere in the corner, a battered boombox crooned bossa nova music with the melancholy sophistication of a 1963 cocktail lounge slowly sinking into the sea.

    The dessert tables looked catastrophic in the best possible way. Berry pies, cream pies, cobblers, and pastries stretched across the room in such abundance they resembled offerings to a Midwestern fertility deity. Each pie sat there with glossy perfection, as though auditioning for the cover of Better Homes & Gardens.

    Naturally, Roland arrived in khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt already smeared with pie filling. By the time I entered the room, he was elbow-deep in boysenberry pie, grinning blissfully with purple crumbs glued to his face like evidence from a carbohydrate crime scene.

    Nadine spotted me immediately.

    “There he is!” she cried, waving me toward a throne-like chair draped in a crocheted blanket that looked one upholstery stain away from hospice care.

    “Special seat for the man of the hour!”

    Before I could protest, she shoved a paper plate into my hands carrying a mountain of boysenberry pie drowning beneath an avalanche of whipped cream.

    Standing beside her were Roberta Hunter and Felice Orozco, Nadine’s two closest confidantes and Hobcallow’s reigning queens of floral-print judgment. Together they resembled a triumvirate of dessert-loving desert oracles silently evaluating everyone’s moral worth, pie technique, and cholesterol levels.

    Then I noticed Leonard and Julian.

    The two men were hauling cases of champagne and bags of ice into the ale house with astonishing cheerfulness. Their faces glowed with purpose. They congratulated me warmly, slapping my back like loyal campaign staffers celebrating an election victory. Strangest of all, they appeared genuinely happy.

    Happier, perhaps, than when they were pretending to be successful.

    “So how exactly,” I asked Nadine carefully, “did you manage to rein in Leonard and Julian?”

    Nadine exchanged a knowing grin with Roberta.

    “I have my ways,” she said.

    Then she leaned closer, lowering her voice conspiratorially.

    “There’s a certain kind of man who needs my intervention. It’s simply a matter of finding him and helping him discover his proper place in the world.”

    Something about the sentence chilled me.

    The evening dissolved into the predictable rituals of Hobcallow celebration: speeches, applause, cake, cheap champagne, and finally Moses announcing that my tenure entitled me to a new executive desk engraved with my initials so I could feel, in his words, “permanently rooted within the intellectual future of Hobcallow.”

    As though an engraved desk could cure existential confusion.

    Later that night, after the party ended, I remained alone inside the darkened ale house surrounded by popped balloons, empty pie tins, wilted streamers, and the sticky residue of forced merriment. I was in no hurry to return to my apartment where Roland was almost certainly already asleep on my couch.

    Outside, Leonard and Julian loaded leftover pies and party supplies into the Chevy truck while soft bossa nova music drifted from a boombox sitting in the truck bed. The two men laughed together warmly beneath the desert night air. I overheard one of them mention they still needed to meet Nadine afterward to “help her with something.”

    I sat there listening to them and felt something cold settle inside me.

    What had happened to these men?

    What had happened to me?

    We were the lost men of Hobcallow, and Nadine Beavers had not merely rescued us. In her own strange maternal empire of pies, casseroles, errands, and emotional dependency, she had quietly absorbed us completely.

    I tried to suppress the thought by reminding myself that Monday morning I would arrive at work to find a brand-new executive desk engraved with my initials—as though polished wood and bureaucratic recognition might finally convince me I belonged somewhere.

  • Professor of Nothing in Particular

    Professor of Nothing in Particular

    In Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission, François is a man who has already filed his best years under “returned goods.” A writing professor in his early forties, he surveys his life with the cool detachment of a critic reviewing a book he didn’t enjoy but can’t quite put down. He blames, with some justice and more convenience, the moral economy of Western social democracies—systems that canonize money and status while leaving meaning to fend for itself. In this world, desire has been simplified to a shopping list. The only sanctioned faith is consumption; the only liturgy is acquisition. You study, you specialize, you exit the university with a résumé and a pulse, and then you prove your seriousness by acquiring things—objects, experiences, signals—until the performance of satisfaction becomes indistinguishable from satisfaction itself. François finds the spectacle tedious, but tedium does not grant immunity. He is as lonely, as unmoored, as anyone else—another citizen of an Ennui Infrastructure that delivers comfort with the enthusiasm of a sedative.

    His chosen saint is Joris-Karl Huysmans, the Catholic convert who traded decadence for doctrine and found, in surrender, a structure strong enough to hold a life. François studies him the way a starving man studies a menu. He recognizes the appeal—order, ritual, a metaphysical address where one might finally receive mail—but recognition is not conversion. He remains stalled in Agnostic Paralysis, admiring belief as a piece of architecture he cannot inhabit. Literature becomes his compromise: books as companions, authors as lanterns. Yet even a luminous guide cannot substitute for a destination. Huysmans can light the road; he cannot make François walk it.

    The job does not save him. Teaching, for François, is a cleanly run sham—a system that reproduces diluted versions of itself with industrial patience. A handful of students catch fire; the rest learn to approximate. He participates in Replicant Pedagogy with professional competence and private contempt, earning a salary in exchange for maintaining a machine that produces echoes and calls them voices. He is good at it. He is paid for it. He is not sustained by it.

    His relationships are equally provisional—brief alliances with pleasure that end as soon as the lights come on. Women are not partners so much as intervals, pauses between bouts of the same familiar boredom. Bitterness seeps in, not as a dramatic outburst but as a steady, low-grade leak. The pattern is reliable: a spike of sensation, a trough of meaning. François lives on Dopamine Subsistence Living, a diet of small thrills that keep the organism moving while starving the person.

    He envies the faithful with a precision that hurts. They possess what he lacks: structure that does not dissolve, families that do not negotiate their own existence, communities that do not expire at closing time. They are, in the most irritating sense, steadier. This steadiness reads to him as advantage, and advantage breeds resentment. He knows, in a way that knowledge cannot help, that they have found a grammar for living that he cannot conjugate.

    Nothing in his life bends toward change. There is no arc, only duration. He suffers the quiet violence of Spiritual Disinheritance—cut off from inherited meanings without the courage or capacity to invent replacements. The days proceed; the man does not.

    In this, François is less a character than a diagnosis. He is a cautionary specimen of Liquid Modernity—a life conducted without anchors in a culture that mistakes motion for progress. He has choices but no commitments, roles but no center, pleasures that evaporate on contact. He sees the hollowness of the system and lacks the will to exit it; even his longing for faith stalls at the threshold like a guest who won’t knock. What remains is not catastrophe but drift: a consciousness fully aware of its own directionlessness, proceeding anyway. It is the most modern tragedy—nothing collapses, and therefore nothing changes.

  • The Sovereign Appetite: How Wealth Devours the Soul

    The Sovereign Appetite: How Wealth Devours the Soul

    In “What I Learned About Billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s Private Retreat,” filmmaker Noah Hawley dissects the moral corrosion that accompanies extreme wealth—a corrosion fueled not by scarcity but by excess. The old adage comes to mind: the more you feed the demon, the hungrier it gets. Only now the demon eats without consequence, outside the jurisdiction of any moral law. The rules that bind ordinary people—limits, restraint, accountability—simply dissolve. In their place emerges what can only be called the Sovereign Appetite Doctrine: an unspoken creed in which desire, once backed by sufficient capital, becomes its own justification, rendering restraint unnecessary and morality negotiable.

    Hawley’s invitation to a 2018 Bezos retreat in Santa Barbara offered a front-row seat to this phenomenon. What he encountered was not insight but spectacle: a carousel of TED Talk-style presentations untethered from any coherent theme, a parade of ideas without consequence or urgency. These talks did not enlighten so much as signal—a kind of intellectual flex, as obligatory to the setting as Wagyu skewers and caviar. Surrounded by this polished emptiness, Hawley found himself asking the only honest question available: “Why am I here?”

    The retreat itself bordered on the absurd. His wife slipped on wet grass and broke her wrist; he and his children contracted hand, foot, and mouth disease, their faces erupting in red blisters. It was less a summit of visionaries than a fever dream of excess, where discomfort and decadence coexisted without irony.

    Bezos, at the time, still seemed to believe in performance. Clad in a tight T-shirt, laughing a little too hard, projecting a curated affability, he appeared invested in being seen as morally intact. There was effort in the act—a sense that the audience still mattered. He had not yet fully surrendered to the Sovereign Appetite Doctrine.

    But, as Hawley notes, that restraint has since evaporated. Today, figures like Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, and Elon Musk no longer perform for approval. They have crossed into something colder and more insulated. In Hawley’s words, “They float in a sensory-deprivation tank the size of the planet, in which their actions are only ever judged by themselves.”

    Here lies the true seduction of wealth. It is not the acquisition of luxury goods but the eerie power of living in a world where everything is “effectively free.” Loss—the very mechanism that gives life weight—disappears. When nothing can be meaningfully lost, nothing can be meaningfully gained. Stakes vanish. Experience flattens. Life becomes curiously hollow, a theater without tension. This is the Infinite Buffer Effect: wealth so vast it absorbs every setback, neutralizing consequence and draining life of narrative shape.

    And yet, this emotional flattening coincides with a grotesque expansion of power. The wealthy, insulated from consequence, begin to experience a counterfeit omnipotence. They act without friction and, in doing so, lose the ability to perceive others as real. As Hawley writes, “If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all.”

    At this point, they no longer inhabit the same moral universe as the rest of us. Cause and effect no longer apply in any meaningful way. They have become full converts to the Sovereign Appetite Doctrine.

    The word that clarifies this condition is solipsism—not as an abstract philosophy but as a lived reality. The world contracts until only the self remains vivid. Everything else fades into backdrop. Hawley shows how extreme wealth accelerates this contraction. When “everything is free and nothing matters,” the presence of other people—their inner lives, their suffering—loses its immediacy. Power without resistance breeds a dangerous illusion: that one’s actions carry no moral weight. Others become instruments, props, scenery. Empathy atrophies. Reality itself begins to feel negotiable. The self expands to fill the entire field of meaning, mistaking insulation for sovereignty.

    Hawley closes by contrasting today’s ultra-wealthy with the robber barons of the Gilded Age. However ruthless, those earlier figures “engaged with the world around them.” Today’s elite, by contrast, drift above it, severed from consequence, history, and meaning. They suffer from what Hawley calls “a disassociation from the reality of cause and effect, from meaning, and history.”

    This is not freedom but its grotesque parody—a form of plutocratic dissociation in which the individual floats outside shared reality, unbound not only from constraint but from significance itself.

    It is no accident that Hawley, the creator behind Fargo, can render this psychological landscape with such precision. He has long been fascinated by characters who drift beyond moral gravity. Here, he turns that same lens on the most powerful figures in our world—and what he reveals is not triumph, but a slow and chilling disappearance of the human.

  • Frank Sinatra Sings the Epistles

    Frank Sinatra Sings the Epistles

    Adam Gopnik, in “St. Paul Remade Human History. How Did He Do It?”, answers a parlor question—who matters most?—with a man who never met Jesus in the flesh and still managed to run the table. Paul, Gopnik says, is “the Most Unforgettable Character It Ever Met,” which is one way of saying he took a minor Jewish sect and scaled it into a two-millennia franchise. Not bad for a writer whose archive could fit in a carry-on.

    The record is thin and, at points, suspicious. Of thirteen letters, only seven pass the authenticity test; the rest look like fan fiction with good handwriting. The Acts of the Apostles reads less like sober history than like a travelogue pitched to Roman investors—Romans good, Jews troublesome, Christians reassuringly adjacent to Rome. It also airbrushes the argument between Paul and James, Jesus’s brother, into a polite agreement, because nothing ruins a new religion like founders who won’t share a table.

    Then comes the Roman catastrophe—the Jewish War, the Temple reduced to memory—and the scramble among sects to survive. Paul does more than survive; he pivots. He takes a local messianic movement and repackages it for export: portable, universal, and politically legible. The man who pulls off this trick also carries the best origin story in religious literature—a blinding encounter on the road to Damascus that converts a persecutor into a salesman with divine backing. If you were storyboarding a faith, you’d keep that scene.

    The letters themselves are a mood swing with footnotes. Paul boasts like a prizefighter and then calls himself “the least of the apostles.” He commands, cajoles, contradicts, confesses. He is competitive enough to crown himself and humble enough to kneel in the same paragraph. He admits a “thorn in the flesh”—a chronic deficit he can’t shake—and then turns it into a credential. He advises missionary pragmatism with the line that could double as a consulting slogan: be all things to all people. The man can pivot.

    Gopnik’s most useful correction is cinematic. Don’t picture Paul as a monk scratching doctrine by candlelight. Picture him as an action lead—shipwrecks, jailbreaks, debates that feel like bar fights in Greek. He travels, argues, survives. He makes the faith mobile—“almost single-handedly,” Gopnik writes—while the original disciples eye him like a franchisee who’s rewriting the menu. It’s the kind of role that once tempted Frank Capra to imagine a film starring Frank Sinatra—Old Blue Eyes as the apostle who sang a religion into the world.

    What Paul omits is as telling as what he proclaims. He is strangely quiet about Jesus’s earthly biography—the family, the miracles, the Nativity tableau that later Christianity will frame and hang in every living room. Gopnik suggests the omission is a feature, not a bug. Keep the myth foregrounded and the particulars backstage, and your message travels better. If you doubt it, look at how newer movements grow: the story glows brighter when the details stay conveniently out of focus.

    Then there’s the thornier matter of Paul’s rhetoric about Jews. After the Holocaust, readers have worked hard to domesticate him into a universalist who welcomes everyone to the table. Gopnik reminds us that some passages resist that makeover, cursing the old covenant with language that doesn’t sit politely at interfaith dinners. The effort to sanitize Paul tells you as much about us as it does about him.

    Scholars, understandably, keep trying on different Pauls. There’s the Roman Paul, smoothing edges for empire; the Hellenistic Paul, speaking in a philosophical key; the Jewish Paul, wrestling with a tradition he both extends and overturns. You can find these costumes neatly hung in Paul Within Paganism, edited by Chantziantoniou, Frederiksen, and Young. Try them all on; none quite fits.

    One thread, however, doesn’t fray: Paul’s apocalyptic urgency. The end is near—soon enough to matter, soon enough to act. Whether he believed it literally or deployed it rhetorically is the kind of question historians love and time refuses to answer. Urgency, after all, is useful even when it’s wrong.

    Gopnik’s final warning is against turning Paul into a greeting card. Yes, he writes the line about love that weddings can’t resist. He also draws hard boundaries with a zeal that would make a modern brand manager blush. Christianity spreads not just on the strength of its compassion but on the clarity of its lines. Inclusion, it turns out, travels well when it knows exactly what it excludes.

    Paul refuses to settle into a single portrait. He is the contradiction that works—the salesman who believes, the believer who markets, the penitent who boasts. If Capra had made that Sinatra film, it might have been the truest version: a man with a voice big enough to carry a room, and a restlessness big enough to carry a religion. Love, sung loud enough, can sound like doctrine. And doctrine, delivered with enough conviction, can change the world.