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.
