Cinemorphosis

Tag: book-review

  • The Timekeeper’s Curse: Why You’ll Never Be Satisfied with Your Watch Collection

    The Timekeeper’s Curse: Why You’ll Never Be Satisfied with Your Watch Collection

    To understand the tortured psyche of the modern Timekeeper, you must first meet his most conniving organ: the Cavebrain. This primal relic, forged in an age of spear tips and saber-toothed tigers, was never designed for eBay, Instagram wrist shots, or limited-edition dive watches with meteorite dials. And yet, here he is in the 21st century, a man both blessed and cursed with opposable thumbs, a PayPal account, and a psychological need for existential renovation every time he clicks Buy It Now.

    A high-ticket watch purchase for the Timekeeper is not a simple act of consumer indulgence—it is a rite of passage, a narrative arc, a full-blown identity reboot. He isn’t just buying a watch; he’s staging a personal renaissance, performing emotional alchemy with brushed titanium and spring-drive movements. He craves the sensation of getting something done—and if he can’t change his life, he’ll change his wrist.

    But a new acquisition can’t simply squeeze into the old watch box like another hot dog in an overstuffed cooler. No, it demands sacrifice. One or more watches must be winnowed down, exiled like loyal but unremarkable lovers who just didn’t “spark joy.” There is drama here—drama more potent than remodeling a kitchen or repainting the bedroom a daring eggshell white. This is a domestic upheaval that matters. The arrival of a new timepiece—let’s call it “the new kid in town”—requires a realignment of the soul.

    Now, for those poor souls unacquainted with Timekeeper theology, let me explain: He cannot simply collect indiscriminately. He is bound by the Watch Potency Principle, a dogma revered by enthusiasts. This principle states that the more watches a man owns, the less any of them mean. Like watering down bourbon, or stretching a heartfelt apology into a TED Talk, the essence gets lost. The once-sacred grails—the unicorns he hunted with obsessive glee—go sour in the dilution of excess. Only by restricting the herd to five to eight carefully curated specimens can he maintain potency and fend off emotional ruin.

    Of course, there’s a devil in the details. The Timekeeper suffers from a chronic affliction known as Watch Curiosity. He’s always sniffing around the next shiny object, eyes darting at macro shots on forums, lurking on Reddit, and falling prey to influencers wearing NATO straps and faux humility. Inevitably, he pulls the trigger on yet another must-have diver, thus initiating the ritual purge. A watch he once swore eternal fidelity to must now be cast out—not because it’s inadequate, but because he has convinced himself that it is. This self-gaslighting feeds a demonic loop known as Watch Flipping Syndrome, wherein watches are bought, sold, and rebought with the desperation of a man trying to time-travel through retail therapy.

    If the Timekeeper is lucky, if he can wrestle his impulses into a coherent, lean collection, he may briefly find peace. But peace is not his natural state. Beneath his curated restraint lies a restlessness, a gnawing sense that time—his most feared adversary—is standing still. His desire for a new watch is not about telling time; it’s about rewriting it. When he buys a new watch, he isn’t updating his collection—he’s updating himself. He wants change, achievement, rebirth.

    Enter the Honeymoon Period—a temporary euphoria where the new watch becomes a talisman of transformation. He floats, rhapsodizes, posts gushing tributes on enthusiast forums. He becomes a preacher in the Church of the Chronograph, recruiting others to experience this miracle. The watch didn’t just change his wardrobe—it changed his life.

    But, as all honeymoons do, the enchantment fades. The novelty rusts. What was once a grail becomes just another object—another timestamp on the long and winding road of emotional substitution. He finds himself, once again, alone with his Cavebrain, who, ever the unreliable life coach, whispers, “Maybe there’s something better out there.”

    Thus, the cycle repeats—endless, compulsive, costly. The Timekeeper is not a collector. He is an evolutionary casualty. A caveman in a smartwatch world, still looking for meaning in a bezel.

  • Welcome to the Kids of Divorced Parents Club

    Welcome to the Kids of Divorced Parents Club

    It was a cold November Friday night at Canyon High School, and the Frosch Dance had been in full swing. Freshmen and sophomores had packed the cafeteria, KC & the Sunshine Band’s throbbing disco beats pulsing through the linoleum and cinderblocks. Boys had huddled on one side, girls on the other, like oil and water at a chemically unstable mixer. You’d stood with Hewitt and Kaufmann, scanning the room for Liz Murphy.

    Kaufmann had jabbed his finger across the cafeteria at a girl who looked like she could’ve started for the Raiders. Broad shoulders, neck like a redwood stump, and a forehead that could stop a speeding truck—she’d stood alone, her eyes glowering from opposite ends of her face like rival sentries. The dark pouches beneath them added to the haunted look. Her mouth, locked in a scowl, might as well have been carved in stone.

    “Must suck to look like the lead singer of Meat Loaf,” Kaufmann had snickered.

    “She’s known as the Tasmanian Devil,” Hewitt added. “Flashburger was yelling ‘Hit the deck! Tasmanian Devil on the loose!’ when she came near the quad. She’s got a twin brother. Both in special ed.”

    “That’s gotta be rough,” you said. “Getting ridiculed every minute of your life.”

    “You probably get used to it,” Kaufmann mused. “Grow a thick skin.”

    “Or maybe you don’t,” you said. “It’s like that myth from Mrs. Hanson’s class—the guy chained to the rock getting his liver eaten every day.”

    “Prometheus,” Kaufmann confirmed.

    “What a hellish life. Constant Prometheus treatment.”

    “Do we even know her name?” Kaufmann asked.

    “Nope,” said Hewitt. “Just Tasmanian Devil. That’s it.”

    That’s when Liz Murphy had walked in, burgundy top hugging her in all the right places, jeans so fitted they might’ve been sewn on. Her red hair flowed behind her like a cape made of fire, and her middle finger was braced, injured. She spotted you and made her way over.

    “I almost didn’t come,” she said. “Emergency room after volleyball. Dislocated my finger. It swelled up like a balloon.”

    Kaufmann cleared his throat. “Sorry on behalf of all the guys for being assholes to you in middle school.”

    “We called you names we shouldn’t have,” Hewitt said.

    “Like Giraffe?” Liz raised one eyebrow.

    They nodded, shamefaced.

    “Yeah, it sucked going home crying myself to sleep every night.”

    “But look at you now,” Kaufmann said.

    “Yeah, lucky me. But I wonder—what if I still looked like a giraffe? Would you still be assholes, or am I only off the hook because I changed?”

    “I can’t honestly say,” Kaufmann mumbled.

    “Be easy on us,” Hewitt pleaded. “We were barely thirteen, super immature.”

    “Not like now?” she said, dripping sarcasm. She turned to you. “You never treated me like that.”

    “Jeff was too afraid of girls to talk to them,” Kaufmann cut in.

    “Diana Nesbitt asked Jeff to kiss her in seventh grade and he fainted,” Hewitt laughed.

    “That’s exaggerated,” you protested.

    “We had to revive you with smelling salts,” Hewitt said.

    “I didn’t faint. I walked into a pole and got disoriented.”

    “You fainted,” Kaufmann said. “We have over a dozen witnesses.”

    “Jeff’s come a long way,” Liz said, slipping her arm around your waist.

    “Wow,” Kaufmann said. “You guys going steady, or what?”

    Liz studied your face. “I don’t know. We haven’t had a DTR.”

    “A what?” Kaufmann asked.

    “Determine the Relationship.”

    “Holy crap,” Kaufmann said. “That would scare the shit out of me. Sounds like an FBI interrogation.”

    The lights dimmed, and “I Hope We Get to Love in Time” started playing. Couples moved to the dance floor. Liz took your hand and led you to the center.

    Kaufmann yelled after you, “I hope you’re blushing, McMahon, because if you’re not, I’ll blush for you!”

    Two minutes into the song, a blood-curdling scream erupted: “Who crushed my face?”

    The music stopped. Lights flipped on. Lori Walker was clutching her eye and shouting that someone had slammed into her. All fingers pointed at the Tasmanian Devil. She insisted she’d just been heading for the drinking fountain.

    Mr. Reinhart rushed in, handed Lori an ice pack, and tried to calm things down. Lori jabbed an accusing finger, curses flying. The Tasmanian Devil ducked behind the soda machine and started crying.

    Mr. Reinhart followed. “You can’t stay there all night.”

    “Wanna bet?”

    “I’ll call your father.”

    “You do that.”

    “Wait in front of the cafeteria. It’s not safe back there.”

    “Why not?”

    “All the electrical stuff. You get shocked, that’s a lawsuit. You hear me?”

    She got up and followed him out.

    The DJ apologized and cued up “For the Love of You.” Liz pulled you close again.

    “I did something really stupid last week,” she said.

    “What?”

    “I found my father.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “I hadn’t seen him since I was little. My cousin found him. He’s in a trailer park in Union City. We went there, and I saw him through the screen door, shirtless, eating KFC, drinking beer, watching Kojak. He screamed at the TV, spit flying. I walked back to the car, told Susanne to take me home. I knew I’d never see him again.”

    “Did you tell your mom?”

    “Hell no. She’d kill me. After the divorce, things were never the same.”

    “Speaking of divorce,” you said. “Something’s up with my parents. My dad took this so-called job promotion, but I think he wants out.”

    “What kind of job?”

    “Travel-heavy. Six months a year.”

    “Oh yeah. He’s a goner.”

    “Divorce City. I can smell it.”

    “Stand in line, Jeff. Soon enough, you’ll be in the Kids of Divorced Parents Club.”

  • The Disappearing Novel and the Culture That Forgot How to Read

    The Disappearing Novel and the Culture That Forgot How to Read

    In his New York Times column “When Novels Mattered,” David Brooks laments the slow vanishing of the novelist as a public figure. Once, the release of a new novel—especially by the likes of Saul Bellow or Toni Morrison—was a cultural event. Now it barely causes a ripple.

    The novel no longer commands attention. The digital age has crushed the reader’s patience, fractured our attention span, and flooded our minds with the shallow stimuli of TikTok, endless texts, and algorithmic rabbit holes. Where once we waited for a new Roth novel with the same anticipation reserved today for a Marvel sequel, we now swipe past literature as if it were spam.

    For Brooks, this is not just a loss—it’s a tragedy. The decline of the novel signals something deeper: a society losing its capacity for moral complexity, nuance, and emotional depth. The great literary writers, he argues, once served as our secular prophets, our social conscience. They told the truth—harsh, beautiful, layered. They gave us characters who were flawed, human, and real—not two-dimensional avatars chasing dopamine hits on social media.

    One of Brooks’ most compelling insights is that this decline is not simply the result of technological distraction, but of cultural timidity. Great literature, he reminds us, requires audacity. The ability to speak outside the safe lanes. To challenge the dominant orthodoxy. And today, particularly among the liberal elite, that audacity is wilting. Brooks argues that young people, especially on college campuses, whisper their opinions in fear. The social cost of independent thinking has grown too high.

    Interestingly, Brooks—who has recently skewered the excesses of the political right—spares them from scrutiny here. His focus is firmly on the left, on the performative virtue and self-censorship that, while well-meaning, suffocates creative risk. In this climate, it’s easier to be righteous than original. Virtue signaling may win you applause online, but it doesn’t lead to great art.

    Yet the most persuasive moment in the essay arrives late, when Brooks describes the collective psychic damage of the last decade. “Our interior lives,” he writes, “are being battered by the shock waves of public events. There has been a comprehensive loss of faith.” That line lands hard. It names something many of us feel: that we are living in a Bosch-like hellscape of noise, cruelty, and absurdity—a fever dream of moral exhaustion.

    Brooks doesn’t say this, but I will: perhaps literature isn’t dead, just stunned. In shock. In digestion. Maybe we can’t write the great novels of this era because we haven’t fully metabolized the era itself. The story hasn’t ended, and we’re still trying to make sense of the firestorm.

    Is the novel dead? I doubt it. It’s sleeping off the chaos. There are still serious novelists out there—unhyped, uncelebrated—doing the slow, unsexy work. One who deserves more recognition is Sigrid Nunez, whose clear, intimate prose hits as hard as anything in Bellow’s canon.

    The talent remains. The novels are still being written. What’s missing is the cultural infrastructure that once elevated them to necessity. We don’t need more influencers—we need readers with stamina. We need a culture willing to wrestle with meaning again.

  • Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

    Joyface and the Gooseberry Lie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    Lot’s Wife Was Human—And So Are You

    The story of Lot’s wife is usually trotted out as a biblical “gotcha”—a cautionary tale about disobedience, attachment, and the fatal cost of looking back. But really, it’s much darker, much richer. It’s about the soul-crushing gravity of nostalgia, the seductive pull of the past, and how the refusal to fully commit to forward motion—spiritually, morally, existentially—can leave us frozen, calcified, halfway between escape and surrender.

    Lot’s wife is never named in the Genesis account. She’s just “Lot’s wife,” a narrative afterthought, a supporting character reduced to a cautionary statue. And yet her fate is more memorable than her husband’s, etched into the landscape as a monument to hesitation.

    Fortunately, Midrashic literature gives her a name—Ado, or more memorably to my ear, Edith. Maybe it’s the residue of All in the Family, but Edith conjures a kind of moral warmth: a woman who feels deeply, who wants to do right, but is also tragically susceptible to emotion and memory. I prefer Edith to “Lot’s wife” not for historical accuracy, but for dignity. Edith feels human, conflicted, real.

    I don’t think Edith turned around because she was vain or shallow. I think she turned because she was haunted. She turned because the past was more than rubble—it was love, memories, people. Her heart was a complex web of longing, and it snagged her. The salt wasn’t a punishment. It was a crystallization of what happens when our nostalgia outweighs our conviction.

    And let’s be honest: Who among us doesn’t have some briny lump of regret weighing us down? Some internal salt pillar we’ve built in the shape of a younger self we can’t stop worshiping?

    Our culture is Edith’s playground. Social media, advertising, and even the algorithms know exactly how to pander to the Edith within. I can’t scroll without being invited into some “Golden Age of Bodybuilding” time warp: vintage photos of Arnold, Zane, Platz, Mentzer; protein powder reboots; playlists that reek of adolescent testosterone and gym chalk. Jefferson Starship and Sergio Oliva, side by side. It’s like being invited to embalm my past and celebrate its eternal youth. I can join message boards and talk shop with other proud monuments to vanished glory, all of us reenacting the same ritual: remembering what life used to feel like. Not what it is.

    This, I suspect, is what it means to turn to salt. Not just to long for the past, but to despise the present. To dig our heels into a world that no longer fits and spit at progress as if it betrayed us. To canonize a version of ourselves that no longer exists, then try to live in its shadow.

    But maybe Edith’s not just a warning. Maybe she’s a mirror. A deeply flawed, deeply human figure who reminds us that the instinct to look back isn’t evil—it’s inevitable. And maybe we don’t conquer that instinct so much as we recognize it, name it, and learn when to say: Enough. That life was real, and it was mine. But I’m walking forward now.

    Or at least trying to.

  • The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    I’m working my way through The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s latest collection of personal essays. Now in her mid-fifties, Daum is unapologetically single and childless by design, having long ago decided that marriage and parenting weren’t roles she could convincingly—or willingly—perform. Much of her work is a dispatch from the front lines of solitude. And she’s damn good at it.

    What Daum does better than most is forge an instant intimacy with her reader. Her essays feel like front porch conversations at dusk—no performance, no agenda, just two adults quietly deconstructing the wreckage of modern life. Her voice evokes the same soulful, offhand brilliance I admire in Sigrid Nunez’s novels: smart without pretense, vulnerable without begging.

    But by the halfway mark, the essays begin to blur. There’s a tonal and thematic sameness that settles in—like the ambient hum of a refrigerator you only notice when it stops. The introspective loop tightens. The sharp lens that once turned mundane moments into epiphanies starts to feel like someone narrating their week out loud after too many days alone.

    There’s the grief over dead dogs. The endless parsing of domestic minutiae. The architectural dream house that never quite materializes. And those fragmented, overstimulated city-life encounters that feel less like essays and more like repurposed Substack entries. It’s not that these topics lack merit—it’s that, in aggregate, they start to feel like what happens when no one interrupts you for too long.

    Now, I say this as a card-carrying member of the Navel-Gazers Guild. I recognize the signs. I know the thrill of dissecting one’s inner weather systems for an imaginary audience. So I don’t say this to judge Daum, but to observe that the limitations of a fully interior life—however self-aware—do begin to show.

    Still, dismissing Daum’s collection as mere navel-gazing would be both lazy and wrong. Her prose is laced with hard-earned wisdom and an acid wit that’s as refreshing as it is unsparing. When she hits, she hits hard—and truthfully. And that, more than novelty or plot, is why I keep turning the pages.

  • Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Hot Pockets, CliffNotes, and the Death of Deep Reading

    Before the Internet turned my brain into a beige slush of browser tabs and dopamine spikes, I used to read like a man possessed. In the early ’90s, I’d lounge by the pool of my Southern California apartment, sun-blasted and half-glossed with SPF 8, reading books with a kind of sacred monastic intensity. A. Alvarez’s The Savage God. Erik Erikson’s Young Man Luther. James Twitchell’s Carnival Culture. James Hillman and Michael Ventura’s rant against the therapy-industrial complex–We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. Sometimes I’d interrupt the intellectual ecstasy to spritz my freshly tanned abs with water—because I was still vain, just literate.

    Reading back then was as natural as breathing. As Joshua Rothman points out in his New Yorker essay, “What’s Happening to Reading?”, there was a time when the written word was not merely consumed—it was inhaled. Books were companions. Anchors. Entire weekends were structured around chapters. But now? Reading is another tab, sandwiched between the news, a TikTok video of a dog on a skateboard, and an unopened Instacart order.

    Rothman nails the diagnosis. Reading used to be linear, immersive, and embodied—your hands on a book, your mind in a world. Now we shuttle between eBooks, PDFs, Reddit threads, and Kindle highlights like neurotic bees skimming data nectar. A “reading session” might include swiping through 200-word essays while eating a Hot Pocket and half-watching a documentary about narco penguins on Netflix. Our attention is fractured, our engagement ritualized but hollow. And yes, the statistics back it up: the percentage of Americans who read at least one book a year dropped from 55% to 48%. Not a cliff, but a slow, sad slide.

    Some argue it’s not worth panicking over—a mere 7% drop. I disagree. As a college instructor, I’ve seen the change up close. Students don’t read long-form books anymore. Assign Frederick Douglass and half the class will disappear into thin air—or worse, generate AI versions of Douglass quotes that never existed. Assign a “safe” book and they might skim the Wikipedia entry. We’ve entered an age where the bar for literacy is whether someone has read more than one captioned infographic per week.

    Rothman tries to be diplomatic. He argues that we’re not consuming less—we’re just consuming differently. Podcasts, YouTube explainers, TikTok essayists—this is the new literacy. And fine. I live in that world, too. I mainline political podcasts like they’re anti-anxiety meds. Most books, especially in the nonfiction space, do feel like padded TED Talks that should have stayed 4,000 words long. The first chapter dazzles; the next nine are a remix of the thesis until you feel gaslit into thinking you’re the problem.

    But now the reading apocalypse has a new beast in the basement: AI.

    We’ve entered the uncanny phase where the reader might be an algorithm, the author might be synthetic, and the glowing recommendation comes not from your friend but from a language model tuned to your neuroses. AI is now both the reader and the reviewer, compressing thousand-page tomes into bullet points so we can decide whether to fake-read them for a book club we no longer attend.

    Picture this: you’re a podcaster interviewing the author of a 600-page brick of a book. You’ve read the first 20 pages, tops. You ask your AI: “Give me a 5-page summary and 10 questions that make me sound like a tortured genius.” Boom—you’re suddenly a better interviewer than if you’d actually read the book. AI becomes your memory, your ghostwriter, your stand-in intelligence. And with every assist, your own reading muscles atrophy. You become fit only for blurbs and bar graphs.

    Or take this scenario: you’re a novelist. You’ve published 12 books. Eleven flopped. One became a cult hit. Your publisher, desperate for cash, wants six sequels. AI can generate them faster, better, and without your creative hand-wringing. You’re offered $5 million. Do you let the machine ghostwrite your legacy, or do you die on the sword of authenticity? Before you answer, consider how often we already outsource our thinking to tools. Consider how often you’ve read about a book rather than the book itself.

    Even the notion of a “writer” is dissolving. When I was in writing classes, names like Updike, Oates, Carver, and Roth loomed large—literary athletes who brawled on live television and feuded in magazines. Writers were gladiators of thought. Now they’re functionally obsolete in the eyes of the market, replaced by a system that values speed, virality, and AI-optimized titles.

    Soon, we won’t pick books. AI will pick them for us. It will scan our history, cross-reference our moods, and deliver pre-chewed summaries tailored to our emotional allergies. It will tell us what to read, what to think about it, and which hot takes to regurgitate over brunch. We’ll become readers in name only—participants in a kind of literary cosplay, where the act of reading is performed but never truly inhabited.

    Rothman’s essay is elegant, insightful, and wrong in one key respect: it shouldn’t be titled What’s Happening to Reading? It should be called What’s Happening to Reading, Writing, and the Human Mind? Because the page is still there—but the reader might not be.

  • Old Money, New Misery: My Southern Charm Obsession

    Old Money, New Misery: My Southern Charm Obsession

    Yes, I’m hooked—addicted, really—to Southern Charm, Bravo’s televised safari through Charlotte, South Carolina’s aristocratic swamp of ennui, vanity, and monogrammed dysfunction. Most of the men are local fixtures: old money, old habits, old egos. They drift through their curated lives like shirtless Gatsby extras, tumbling into affairs, start-up flops, and half-baked rebrands of their own manhood—usually involving whiskey, dubious real estate ventures, and “branding consultants” who charge $8,000 to tell them to get a podcast. They aren’t villains exactly—there’s a flicker of decency beneath the smugness—but they are prone to recreational cruelty. Boredom gives their mischief a sadistic edge. Monogamy is a punchline. Direction is a punch-drunk memory. They’re trapped in a gilded cage of their own entitlement, slouching toward irrelevance with cocktails in hand. For the most part, they are a cast of man-child babies performing businessman cosplay.

    The women, in contrast, seem genetically engineered for composure, ambition, and unearned patience. While the men unravel like overpriced cable-knit sweaters, the women balance jobs, goals, and the emotional labor of pretending to be intrigued by yet another man-child’s whiskey brand. They hold the show together. They’re smarter, sharper, and infinitely more emotionally competent. Frankly, they deserve their own spin-off where they leave the men behind and conquer the Southeast in blazers and heels.

    And presiding over this high-society soap opera like a Southern Sphinx is Grand Matriarch Patricia. She doesn’t walk—she presides. Draped in silk and judgment, she rules from her settee with a cocktail in one hand and a butler at her heels. Her hobbies include throwing theme parties for her yapping purse-dogs, matchmaking with surgical precision, and purchasing $30,000 gold elephants out of sheer boredom. She’s not a character; she’s a living monument to genteel tyranny. Watching her is like watching Downton Abbey if it were sponsored by bourbon and Botox.

    Honestly? The show makes me want to move to Charlotte. The humid rain gives me Florida flashbacks. The homes are plush, the restaurants look sinfully inviting, and every time I watch Southern Charm, I find myself daydreaming of strolling through the city in linen pants, pretending I too have nothing better to do than flirt, sip, and emotionally combust in a well-upholstered room.

  • Toxins, Teas, and the Tyranny of Self-Care

    Toxins, Teas, and the Tyranny of Self-Care

    In How to Be Well: Navigating Our Self-Care Epidemic, One Dubious Cure at a Time, Amy Larocca introduces us to the “Well Woman”—an aspirational specter of affluent spirituality who floats through Erewhon aisles like a priestess of turmeric. She is non-religious but deeply “spiritual,” an educated, upper-middle-class avatar of intentional living. Her diet? Whole, organic, plant-based. Her skincare? Sourced from the tears of ethically massaged avocados. Her wardrobe? Soft, breathable cottons dyed with herbs. Her soul? Allegedly pure.

    She’s the type who throws around words like “boundaries” and “holding space” while sipping adaptogenic mushroom tea. Fluent in therapy-speak and swaddled in the cozy lexicon of mindfulness, she’s not just living—she’s curating her life, building an identity out of emollients, detoxes, and artisanal spices. And all of it—every mindful, ethically sourced drop—feeds the $5.6 trillion wellness-industrial complex.

    Larocca sees through the yoga-scented fog. The Well Woman, she argues, is just the latest installment in America’s ongoing franchise of unattainable feminine ideals: a new model to aspire to, envy, and—most importantly—buy into. Today’s purity isn’t moral; it’s material.

    Reading Larocca’s opening, I couldn’t help but think of Todd Haynes’s 1995 masterpiece Safe, in which Carol White—a vapid housewife in the chemical-glazed sprawl of the San Fernando Valley—slowly dissolves into the cult of purity. After one too many trips to the dry cleaner, Carol spirals into an obsession with environmental toxins, abandons her friends and family, and ends up exiled to a pastel-drenched wellness commune. There she lives alone in a sterile dome, staring at herself in the mirror, parroting affirmations until there’s nothing left behind her eyes but empty devotion.

    Carol White is the ghost of the Well Woman’s future—a cautionary tale in Lululemon. She doesn’t find peace; she finds a purgatory curated by Goop. And as Larocca peels back the lavender-scented rhetoric of self-care, it’s clear she sees this modern cult of wellness not as healing but as hollowing—a $5.6 trillion seduction that promises salvation and delivers scented self-delusion.

  • The Shop Foreman of My Own Dysfunction and Other Life Chapters

    The Shop Foreman of My Own Dysfunction and Other Life Chapters

    At 63, I now divide my life into chapters—not by achievements or milestones, but by bone density, hormone decay, and the gradual hardening of the frontal cortex. Think of it as an anatomical calendar, where each page curls with protein shakes, pretension, and the occasional existential crisis.

    Chapter One: The Barbara Eden Years.
    Childhood wasn’t about innocence—it was about Cap’n Crunch. Bowls of it. Oceans of sweetened corn rubble. I dreamed not of firetrucks or baseball cards but of living inside Barbara Eden’s genie bottle—a plush, velvet-lined fever dream of satin pillows and cleavage. If Barbara Eden wasn’t beaming into my imagination, there was always Raquel Welch in fur bikinis or Barbara Hershey smoldering her way across a screen. This was hormonal awakening served with a side of sugar coma.

    Chapter Two: The Strength Delusion.
    By twelve, I was slamming Bob Hoffman’s bulk-up protein like it was communion wine. At Earl Warren Junior High, I became a Junior Olympic Weightlifter—a gladiator-in-training who wanted pecs like dinner plates and the gravitas of a Marvel origin story. This was the age of iron worship and adolescent mythology: I wasn’t building muscle—I was forging armor.

    Chapter Three: The Intellectual Flex.
    In my late teens, I realized I had all the social charm of a wet gym sock. So I went cerebral. I buried myself in Kafka, Nabokov, and classical piano, amassing a CD library of Beethoven and Chopin that could rival the Library of Congress. I worked in a wine shop where I learned to pronounce “Bordeaux” with a nasal twang and described Chablis as “crisp with notes of existential regret.” I didn’t just want to be smart—I wanted to be the human embodiment of a New Yorker cartoon.

    Chapter Four: The Shop Foreman of My Own Dysfunction.
    Marriage and employment hit like a cold bucket of reality. Suddenly, I had to function around other human beings. My inner demons—once delightfully antisocial—were now liabilities. I had to manage them like a foreman supervising a warehouse of unruly toddlers armed with crowbars. Turns out, no one wants to be married to a psychological landfill. I had to self-regulate. I had to evolve. This wasn’t personal growth; it was preventative maintenance, or what other people simply call adulthood.

    Chapter Five: Diver Cosplay.
    In my forties, I had just enough disposable income and suburban ennui to start collecting dive watches. Not just one or two. A flotilla. I wanted to be the hero of my own fantasy—a rugged diver-explorer-adventurer who braved Costco parking lots with a Seiko strapped to his wrist. This was less about telling time and more about clinging to the idea that I was still dangerous, or at least interesting. Spoiler: I was neither.

    Chapter Six: The Age of Denial and Delusion.
    These days, the watches still gleam, but now I’m staring down the barrel of cholesterol, visceral fat, and the slow betrayal of my joints. I swing kettlebells five days a week like a garage-dwelling warlock trying to ward off decay. I track my protein like a Wall Street analyst and greet each new biomarker like a hostile corporate audit. Am I aging gracefully? Hardly. I’m white-knuckling my way through geriatric resistance and calling it “wellness.” If I’m Adonis, then somewhere in the attic there’s a Dorian Gray portrait of my pancreas in open revolt.

    I know what’s coming: Chapter Seven. The reckoning. The spiritual compost heap where I either make peace with my body’s betrayal or turn into a bitter relic that grunts through foam-rolling sessions like it’s trench warfare. It’ll be the chapter where I either ascend or unravel—or both.

    And while our chapters differ in flavor, I suspect we’re all reading from the same book. Different fonts, same plot twist: we start with fantasies, build identities, fight the entropy, and eventually, we all kneel before the mirror and ask, “Was that it?”