Cinemorphosis

Tag: books

  • Nothing Gets Better

    Nothing Gets Better

    Yesterday my piano tuner, Cecil, came by to work on my upright. He is pushing eighty, has spent a lifetime coaxing reluctant pianos back into harmony, and charges $250 for a tuning. I pay it gladly. When someone has become the best in the business, you stop thinking about the fee and start thinking about the privilege.

    After he finished, we lingered and talked about Southern California.

    I told him that whenever I return to my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, I leave with the same impression: everything feels more crowded, more hurried, more stressful, and somehow less hospitable than I remember. The roads seem angrier. The neighborhoods seem denser. Even the air feels impatient.

    Without the slightest hesitation, Cecil smiled and delivered a sentence that landed with the force of an ancient proverb.

    “Nothing gets better.”

    The words settled over me like a truth I had always known but kept forgetting.

    Nothing gets better.

    Cecil continued. Torrance, he predicted, will eventually resemble West Los Angeles. Massive apartment complexes are already rising near our neighborhood. Del Amo Fashion Center has become a preview of the future. Try finding a parking space after eleven o’clock on a weekday. On weekends, don’t bother. The future has already begun circling the parking lot.

    Yet Cecil wasn’t complaining.

    That is the crucial distinction.

    His observation was not an invitation to pessimism but to realism.

    Most of our unhappiness comes from quietly assuming that the world ought to become more convenient, more orderly, more civilized, and less crowded as time marches on. When reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate, we conclude that something has gone terribly wrong.

    Perhaps nothing has gone wrong at all.

    Perhaps this is simply what civilizations do. They grow denser, noisier, more complicated, and more exhausting. Every technological advance solves one problem while inventing three new ones. Every improvement arrives carrying an invoice.

    I have come to think of this as the Cecil Principle: the recognition that the world rarely becomes simpler, quieter, or more civilized over time, requiring us to cultivate resilience rather than nostalgia or utopian expectation.

    The Cecil Principle reminded me of psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who reduces life to three unavoidable realities: pain, uncertainty, and constant work. According to Stutz, psychological health begins not by escaping these conditions but by accepting them. The fantasy that life should become comfortable is itself the source of much unnecessary suffering.

    Cecil, with considerably fewer words, had arrived at the same destination.

    Nothing gets better.

    Strangely, there is liberation in that sentence. Once I stop expecting history to reward me with perpetual improvement, I become less resentful when it doesn’t. I stop waiting for the perfect city, the perfect traffic pattern, the perfect political climate, or the perfect era. I become more attentive to the quiet pleasures still available: a well-tuned piano, an honest conversation, a competent craftsman who has spent decades mastering his trade.

    Nothing gets better.

    Oddly enough, accepting that fact makes life better.

    The truth, after all, has an unexpected habit of setting us free.

  • The Attention Vultures Descend

    The Attention Vultures Descend

    I watched Netflix’s three-part documentary Idaho Murders: College Nightmare, expecting another true-crime chronicle. Instead, I found a cautionary tale about the moral corrosion of the social media age.

    The murders shattered the illusion of an idyllic college town where doors, friendships, and assumptions of decency had long remained open. Into that atmosphere of trust stepped a doctoral teaching assistant in criminology whose crimes seemed almost grotesquely theatrical: an aspiring expert in criminal behavior who became the very monster he purported to study. The documentary is unsettling not merely because it chronicles an act of staggering brutality, but because it reveals how quickly evil can erupt into places that imagine themselves immune from it.

    Yet the documentary’s most instructive chapter unfolds after the killings, during the long months when investigators had no public suspect. That vacuum of knowledge became oxygen for the internet. Social media influencers rushed to fill the silence, speaking with the confidence of detectives while possessing none of the evidence. Their videos, podcasts, and livestreams transformed ignorance into certainty. Innocent college students—already traumatized by the murders—were publicly identified as suspects, dissected as if they were characters in a murder mystery rather than human beings whose lives could be permanently scarred by reckless speculation.

    These people were not engaged in an earnest search for truth. They were engaged in a hunt for attention. Every accusation, every dramatic thumbnail, every emphatic declaration became another bid for clicks, subscribers, and algorithmic favor. Tragedy had become raw material for personal branding.

    Years ago, Jaron Lanier warned that social media rewards the most primitive parts of our psychology. The platforms appeal less to our reflective minds than to our craving for recognition, outrage, and status. They encourage us to chase attention as if it were oxygen. Watching the documentary, I felt as though Lanier’s warning had escaped the pages of his book and materialized on the screen. The influencers were not simply exploiting a tragedy; they had become creatures shaped by an economy in which visibility matters more than truth and confidence is valued above evidence.

    The documentary left me thinking less about the murderer than about myself. Over the last fifteen years, I have spent enough time on social media to recognize the same impulse in miniature—the subtle desire to post, comment, and share simply because an audience is there. The temptation is rarely malicious, but it springs from the same psychological soil: the hope of being noticed.

    The film made me want to cultivate a new habit. Before posting, I want to pause and ask a simple question: Am I adding light, or am I merely asking strangers to look at me? That brief moment of hesitation may be the smallest possible act of resistance against an attention economy that profits from our worst instincts.

    The documentary’s greatest lesson, then, has little to do with criminology. It is about character. It asks whether we will become citizens who value truth enough to remain silent when we do not know—or whether we will join the growing flock of attention vultures circling every human tragedy, mistaking spectatorship for significance. I know which path I hope to avoid. If that requires changing my relationship with social media, it is a price well worth paying.

  • The Gospel According to the Irvine Spectrum

    The Gospel According to the Irvine Spectrum

    On our way to a vacation in Carlsbad, we made an unplanned pilgrimage to the Irvine Spectrum. A retailer had forgotten to remove one of those magnetic security tags—the kind that doesn’t merely protect merchandise but threatens to baptize it in indelible dye should you attempt to liberate it yourself.

    It was ninety degrees outside, yet the mall overflowed with shoppers who looked as though they had wandered out of a lifestyle advertisement. Most appeared to be under twenty-one, gliding effortlessly through the promenade in athletic shorts, yoga pants, or denim cutoffs so abbreviated they seemed engaged in an argument with modesty. They possessed that enviable firmness exclusive to youth: muscles earned not through discipline but through adolescence itself. Nature had done all the work, leaving many of them with the faintly irritating confidence of people who mistake a genetic inheritance for a personal achievement.

    The boys wore that ubiquitous haircut that resembles broccoli sprouting from their skulls: luxuriant tufts piled high above sides clipped so close they looked apologetic. Somewhere a barber had convinced an entire generation that vegetables belonged on the human head.

    The older men were no less committed to the performance. Many looked to be in their forties, dressed in expensive athletic wear that existed less for exercise than for exhibition. Their fitted shirts advertised sculpted shoulders, bulging biceps, and veins that appeared to have negotiated sponsorship deals with their forearms. Aviator sunglasses completed the ensemble. They looked as though they had stepped directly from an Outdoor Voices or Vuori photo shoot, each one silently auditioning to become the patron saint of functional leisure.

    Then there was me.

    I was too old for the mall, too heavy for the uniform, and wearing exactly the wrong shirt: a T-shirt emblazoned with Snoopy and the words World Champion Dad.

    At that moment, I did not feel like a champion of anything.

    While my wife and daughters disappeared into the stores to rectify the retailer’s oversight, I settled into the shade beside a fountain and watched humanity file past.

    What struck me first was not the clothing itself but its uncanny uniformity. Nearly everyone seemed assembled from the same inventory. Their shirts, shoes, sunglasses, handbags, water bottles, and watches appeared to have been harvested from neighboring storefronts. Like hermit crabs constructing protective shells from whatever debris washes onto the ocean floor, these shoppers had fashioned exoskeletons from the flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture.

    But the clothing was only the outer shell.

    The deeper transformation had taken place beneath the fabric.

    These people had absorbed the mall’s emotional atmosphere as thoroughly as they had absorbed its fashions. They radiated the mall’s synthetic optimism, its perpetual cheerfulness, its frictionless sentimentality, and its promise that fulfillment was perpetually one purchase away. Every storefront preached the same gospel: happiness is available in your size, and it’s twenty percent off this weekend.

    Deism proposes that the Creator reveals Himself through nature.

    Mallism proposes something else entirely.

    It teaches that the faithful gradually become expressions of the mall itself. Its architecture colonizes their imagination. Its values become their values. Its aesthetics become their personality. They cease merely to shop there; they begin to embody the place.

    The mall, in other words, manufactures not only consumers but a recognizable species of human being.

    Watching the procession from my shaded bench, I wondered whether I had stumbled into a habitat rather than a marketplace—a carefully engineered ecosystem in which identity, aspiration, and self-worth circulated through the air-conditioning along with the scent of cinnamon rolls and expensive perfume.

    Perhaps every civilization eventually constructs temples.

    Ours simply installed escalators.

  • The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    Jeremy lives in Louisiana, but over the past decade he and I have shared the peculiar fraternity that develops among people who have spent far too much time thinking about watches. He has followed my YouTube channel long enough to witness my latest affliction unfold in real time.

    It began six months ago with a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    Then came the Rescue GW-7900.

    Soon afterward I was fully initiated into the cult of Multiband-6. Every night while I slept, invisible radio signals synchronized my watches to atomic clocks, and every morning I awoke to the intoxicating certainty that the digits on my wrist displayed the exact time—not approximately, not close enough, but the precise time.

    Jeremy watched this transformation with sympathy until he made the fatal mistake of buying a few Multiband-6 G-Shocks himself.

    Recently he wrote to confess that his own hobby had entered a state of upheaval.

    Not ruined.

    Upended.

    He had contracted the same addiction.

    Like me, he had become enslaved to the quiet pleasure of glancing at a digital display that never needed correction. Like me, he found himself staring at mechanical divers worth several thousand dollars and struggling to justify putting them on his wrist. His collection, like mine, had suffered what I call The Great Divide.

    Mine is specifically the G-Shock–Seiko Divide.

    Jeremy’s divide is somewhat different. His luxury mechanical pieces wear both Swiss passports and Japanese ones, but the conflict is identical.

    Two incompatible ideas of what a watch should be now compete for the same wrist.

    Ironically, this essay began as something far more trivial.

    I intended to make a YouTube video reviewing my Seiko divers on Divecore Waffle straps made from Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. Three of my twenty-millimeter Divecore Waffles currently adorn my Seiko SLA055, SLA051, and SLA023. My SBDC203 remains on its original Seiko “Chocolate Bar” rubber strap, while my Seiko Tuna SBBN049 wears a twenty-two-millimeter Divecore Waffle.

    I genuinely miss my Divecore FKM HP straps. They were magnificent. Yet the lingering discussion surrounding PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” associated with fluorinated materials—finally persuaded me that they were an unnecessary source of anxiety. My suspicion is that the straps are probably harmless. But “probably harmless” is an awkward companion for something strapped to your skin every day. Why carry even a hypothetical worry when the Divecore Waffles are every bit as handsome?

    I had planned to spend twenty minutes discussing rubber straps.

    Then I stopped myself.

    Who cares about straps?

    I already made peace with abandoning steel bracelets years ago.

    The straps weren’t the story.

    The story was that I had reached a point where every glance at my watch box required choosing between two entirely different philosophies.

    My Seikos are objects of astonishing beauty.

    Their dials possess depth, warmth, texture, and craftsmanship that industrial resin can never hope to imitate. On today’s used market my five Seiko divers are probably worth around nine thousand dollars. They are miniature works of art.

    My G-Shocks, by contrast, are worth perhaps a thousand dollars altogether.

    They are molded from industrial resin.

    They resemble equipment more than jewelry.

    They synchronize themselves every night.

    They weigh almost nothing.

    They display the exact time in large, unapologetic digits.

    They ask nothing of me.

    The Seikos appeal to my aesthetic imagination.

    The G-Shocks satisfy my practical mind.

    Guess which one wins about ninety percent of the time.

    It would be easy to write one of those tiresome minimalist sermons declaring that I should have skipped expensive mechanical watches altogether and bought only affordable G-Shocks. Such hindsight is wonderfully economical because it edits out the actual life that was lived.

    For more than twenty years I sowed my horological oats among mechanical watches.

    There was obsession.

    There was ecstasy.

    There was irrationality.

    There was financial excess.

    There was genuine beauty.

    There was hard-earned knowledge.

    Without those decades, I would never appreciate the peculiar satisfaction of glancing at a Mudman GW-9500 and knowing that the time displayed is as accurate as physics presently allows.

    Counterfactual histories are comforting fantasies. They allow us to imagine that wisdom could have arrived without tuition.

    It cannot.

    An hour before writing this, I was wearing my beloved Seiko Uemura. I admired its magnificent dial, then found myself squinting to determine the approximate time.

    Approximate.

    A few moments later I quietly removed it and fastened the Mudman to my wrist.

    Jeremy understands exactly why.

    My suspicion is that thousands of other watch enthusiasts do as well. Once you’ve crossed the Great Divide, you never entirely return. The two worlds continue to coexist, each beautiful in its own way, while your wrist quietly votes for only one.

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

    A year ago, I attended a family birthday party in Studio City. Hundreds of cheerful, talkative guests wandered around a lavish backyard pool shaded by thick stands of trees. The setting felt less like Los Angeles than a country estate in Provence. Beneath a canopy, guests feasted on fragrant Middle Eastern food while a white-haired band by the deep end of the pool played one boomer anthem after another. It was a celebration of long lives, old friendships, and accumulated memories.

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

    While eating lunch, I spoke with my cousin’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator. A man who had once occupied positions of enormous responsibility, he told me the greatest surprise of old age wasn’t aching joints or declining stamina.

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

    His remark landed with the force of an unwelcome prophecy. Your accomplishments, reputation, expertise, and decades of experience quietly evaporate. Whatever authority once entered the room ahead of you no longer accompanies you through the door. You undergo what I call Aura Expiration: the quiet disappearance of the prestige, authority, and social recognition accumulated over a lifetime once age strips away the culture’s fascination with achievement and status.

    Yesterday’s distinguished physician becomes today’s anonymous old man standing patiently in line at Trader Joe’s.

    Aura Expiration ushers you into something even stranger. You enter what I think of as Social Hades: the peculiar stage of life in which a person remains physically present while gradually disappearing from society’s field of vision. You are neither fully among the living nor entirely absent. You become ghostlike—a witness rather than a participant—despite possessing more knowledge and experience than many of those who unconsciously dismiss you.

    Your very existence reminds younger people of the one truth they spend enormous energy avoiding: they, too, are running out of time.

    Naturally, there are ways to resist. You can dye your hair, chase fashion, cultivate the illusion of perpetual youth, or loudly insist that you are “still relevant.” But there is something tragic about watching a person wage war against chronology. The struggle itself often accelerates the indignity. Better to heed the biblical warning against kicking against the goads. Some losses are not defeats but transitions.

    Reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, I was struck by his observation that the Greeks imagined the afterlife as Hades, “an underworld where men’s shadows lead a sort of half-life: slow, comatose, larva-like, hardly aware.”

    I cannot help wondering whether this image grew partly from ordinary observation. Perhaps Hades resembled the fate awaiting the elderly in every civilization: still alive, yet treated as shadows; still capable of thought, yet gently ushered to the margins where they could cease interrupting youth’s fantasy of immortality.

    I have little interest in fighting that social reality. At best, younger people will treat me with courteous indifference. At worst, they will regard me as an inconvenient reminder that every fashionable face eventually wrinkles and every energetic stride slows.

    There is, however, one form of aging against which I intend to fight with all the stubbornness I possess.

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

    I intend to keep reading difficult books, pursuing arguments, changing my mind when evidence demands it, writing essays, asking inconvenient questions, and remaining incurably curious. I would like to live forever, if only because I desperately want to know what happens next.

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

    Many young people imagine themselves to be in the thick of life merely because they inhabit the latest trends, wear the correct clothes, speak the approved vocabulary, and faithfully repeat the fashionable opinions of their tribe. Yet conformity has a way of anesthetizing curiosity. The mind quietly hardens while the body remains young.

    That is the true danger.

    Such people suffer from what I call The Larval Mind: a state of intellectual dormancy in which curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment have withered away, leaving a person easily manipulated by fashion, ideology, algorithms, or tribal consensus. Their bodies pulse with youthful energy while their minds drift through life half-asleep.

    An eighty-year-old wrestling with Paul, Carrère, Darwin, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization may be far younger than a twenty-five-year-old who has surrendered his thinking to TikTok, political orthodoxy, influencer culture, or whatever intellectual narcotic happens to dominate the moment.

    Perhaps youth has less to do with birthdays than with curiosity.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is not youth at all.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is refusing to become larval.

  • Legacy by Accident

    Legacy by Accident

    Ambition, vanity, posterity, or some other vainglorious itch may one day persuade you to write a book. You imagine Your Book as a respectable object of a certain length and seriousness, and then you set about manufacturing one. If you possess talent and something worth saying, you may even succeed. But, truth be told, that sort of book interests me far less than another kind: the book you never intended to write, the one that emerged despite your intentions.

    Blaise Pascal never sat down to compose a grand philosophical masterpiece. He scribbled fragments, observations, prayers, and flashes of insight on loose sheets of paper. Their intellectual voltage proved so extraordinary that, after his death, others gathered them into what became the Pensées. Paul, likewise, never dreamed of writing the New Testament. As Emmanuel Carrère observes in The Kingdom, “Paul didn’t write to create a body of work, but to keep in contact with the churches he founded.” Thirty-two thousand words—less than many contemporary self-help books—were enough to redirect the course of civilization.

    It is an unsettling truth for aspiring authors: good writing almost always defeats the book.

    N. T. Wright understands this instinctively. He opens his biography of Paul with the cinematic declaration, “Nothing would ever be quite the same again.” Paul strides onto the stage not as a quiet pastor dutifully composing devotional literature but as a theological wrecking ball, crashing through the ancient world and scattering centuries of inherited assumptions in every direction. He isn’t simply proclaiming a message. He is contesting the marketplace of ideas with the confidence of a man who believes history itself is about to change.

    Wright’s first exhibit is almost laughably modest: Paul’s surviving letters amount to roughly eighty printed pages.

    Eighty pages.

    That isn’t even the length of a forgettable airport thriller purchased on impulse before boarding business class. Yet those few dozen pages have been translated, debated, revered, condemned, dissected, footnoted, weaponized, and adored more than perhaps any comparable body of writing in history. They have shaped theology, politics, ethics, literature, philosophy, and the imagination of entire civilizations. 

    As I sort through the mountain of commentary I have written about Paul, the most astonishing fact isn’t any single doctrine he preached. It is the staggering disproportion between the size of his corpus and the magnitude of its consequences.

    One cannot help wondering whether this was accidental.

    Was Paul quietly constructing his own immortality, forging a legacy one epistle at a time? Was every letter another carefully placed stone in a monument he hoped would outlive him?

    The suspicion is understandable.

    Yet the stronger case points elsewhere.

    Paul writes like a man too consumed by immediate crises to worry about literary immortality. Congregations are splintering. Converts are backsliding. Rival teachers are circling. Stoics, Epicureans, mystery religions, pagan cults, and competing forms of Judaism all crowd the intellectual marketplace. Paul enters that arena not to preserve his reputation but to win an argument he believes carries eternal consequences. Wright aptly calls him a “contextual theologian.” Paul knew his gospel was not the only voice speaking in the first century. He simply believed it was the only one capable of making sense of the human condition in all its tragic grandeur—a conviction that pulses through every chapter of Romans.

    He was not composing a book.

    He was fighting a war.

    His letters are dispatches from the front lines, written with urgency, exhaustion, exasperation, tenderness, and flashes of breathtaking genius. At times he sounds like a patient mentor. At others he sounds like a man on the verge of a nervous breakdown. He contradicts himself, doubles back, argues, pleads, explodes, consoles, and reasons. Whatever else one says about Paul, he never sounds manufactured. He writes as though the fate of the world depends upon persuading one more wavering believer.

    That authenticity may explain his enduring influence better than any calculated literary ambition ever could.

    Most books, despite their impressive page counts and solemn intentions, vanish almost as soon as they appear. They enjoy a brief season on bookstore display tables before quietly migrating to library clearance sales, thrift stores, and eventually the recycling bin. The grand literary monument proves as consequential as a sneeze.

    But every so often another kind of writing appears.

    It is not trying to become a book. It is trying to solve an urgent problem, persuade a living audience, comfort frightened people, settle an argument, or tell the truth before time runs out. Only later does history gather those scattered pages together and recognize what their author never intended.

    That is what I call Legacy by Accident: enduring influence achieved not by chasing posterity, but as the unforeseen consequence of writing with such authenticity and urgency that posterity comes looking for you.

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The G-Shock Boys

    The G-Shock Boys

    For decades he devoted himself to mechanical dive watches.

    His collection consumed tens of thousands of dollars, countless evenings on watch forums, and enough YouTube viewing to qualify as graduate work in horology. Every purchase promised permanence. Every new bezel, movement, and dial texture whispered that contentment was only one more acquisition away.

    Then, almost by accident, he bought a humble resin Casio G-Shock with Multiband 6 and Tough Solar.

    Everything changed.

    For the first time in his adult life, he glanced at his wrist and saw not merely the time, but the correct time. Alongside it sat the date and the day of the week, all delivered with effortless certainty. No winding. No resetting. No wondering whether the movement had drifted six or seven seconds since breakfast.

    He had quietly crossed a border.

    He had left the Kingdom of Approximate Time and entered the Republic of Accurate Time.

    The conversion brought unexpected peace.

    It also brought guilt.

    He felt as though he had betrayed lifelong companions—the mechanical-watch enthusiasts with whom he had shared triumphs, disappointments, and endless debates about lume, bezel action, and the superiority of one Swiss caliber over another. His social-media tribe suddenly felt like an abandoned religion. He experienced disorientation, grief, and the peculiar emotional wreckage that accompanies every genuine conversion.

    Confused, he confided in a trusted colleague.

    The man listened patiently and nodded.

    “I think you’re ready,” he finally said.

    “Ready for what?”

    “The House of Resin.”

    Perched atop one of the hills in Palos Verdes stood a sprawling Mediterranean mansion known only among initiates as The House of Resin.

    It existed for one purpose: helping newly converted souls orient themselves to life inside Accurate Time.

    Desperate, our hero made the pilgrimage.

    The front door swung open to reveal a portly, smiling gentleman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sebastian Cabot. His cheerful eyes suggested that nothing in the universe surprised him anymore.

    “Welcome,” he said warmly. “I’m Jaunty.”

    The living room resembled an English country house designed by Casio. Bach cello suites floated through magnificent loudspeakers. Delicate porcelain cups brimmed with tea. Crackers of suspiciously exceptional quality circulated on silver trays.

    Around the room sat a dozen men.

    Every one of them wore a G-Shock.

    Every one of them looked profoundly uncomfortable, like survivors of a shipwreck who had somehow washed ashore in paradise but still missed the sinking vessel.

    After the tea had been poured and the crackers consumed, Jaunty’s smile disappeared.

    His posture stiffened.

    His eyes narrowed.

    “The time for pleasantries has ended.”

    Silence swallowed the room.

    “You are here because you have awakened. You have escaped Approximate Time, but you are not yet free. Freedom demands sacrifice.”

    He paused.

    “The first step is simple.”

    Another pause.

    “You will sell every mechanical watch you own.”

    A collective gasp swept through the room.

    “You will donate the proceeds to organizations that feed the hungry. Research them carefully. Find those worthy of your trust.”

    His voice softened.

    “You cannot carry two kingdoms on one wrist.”

    No one argued.

    The command possessed the quiet authority of Scripture.

    Within days the watches were gone.

    The strange thing was not the loss.

    It was what followed.

    Every man felt lighter.

    Younger.

    More awake.

    Many developed an overwhelming urge to walk for hours. During those solitary journeys, decades of buying, selling, flipping, chasing limited editions, and refreshing dealer websites replayed in vivid detail.

    They watched themselves as though observing strangers.

    Marionettes dancing on strings they had never noticed.

    As realization deepened, their pace quickened.

    Many found themselves crying.

    Not polite tears.

    Not cinematic tears.

    The deep, involuntary tears that arrive when an illusion finally surrenders.

    They no longer cared who saw them.

    The tears required no apology.

    The following week they returned.

    Each told essentially the same story.

    Jaunty nodded.

    “Excellent.”

    Then his expression darkened.

    “Do not mistake liberation for completion.”

    He explained that exhilaration would eventually give way to doubt, loneliness, and nostalgia. Recovery always progressed that way.

    Then he introduced Step Two.

    “You will train.”

    The men looked puzzled.

    “You will exercise four days each week. Lift weights. Swing kettlebells. Practice yoga. Climb ropes. Do calisthenics. I do not care what discipline you choose. Your body has spent years transporting your obsession. It is now time for your obsession to transport your body.”

    One participant timidly raised his hand.

    “Ever since selling my watches I’ve been walking two hours every day.”

    The others nodded enthusiastically.

    “So have we.”

    Jaunty smiled kindly.

    “Those are not workouts.”

    “What are they?”

    “Exorcisms.”

    The room fell silent.

    “They are necessary.”

    “But they do not count.”

    Within days the men discovered the irresistible simplicity of a twenty-five-pound kettlebell and an online instructor promising complete physical transformation through twelve exercises performed in a continuous one-hour circuit.

    Every garage became a monastery.

    Every kettlebell became a sacrament.

    By the third week something extraordinary began happening.

    Crows appeared.

    One landed on a fence and clearly announced,

    “Casio.”

    Another cried,

    “G-Shock.”

    A third declared,

    “Solar.”

    When the men nervously described these encounters, Jaunty beamed.

    “Entirely normal,” he assured them.

    “The crows always come.”

    “What should we do?”

    “Feed them breadcrumbs.”

    By the fourth week, no one arrived wearing ordinary clothes.

    Their bodies had changed.

    Their old wardrobes no longer fit—not physically or psychologically.

    Athletic clothing had become their natural attire.

    Their wrists displayed beloved G-Shocks with the quiet confidence formerly reserved for Swiss luxury.

    Jaunty surveyed them with unmistakable satisfaction.

    “You have completed your initiation.”

    He dimmed the lights.

    “For your graduation…”

    “…I have prepared a film.”

    The title appeared.

    THE G-SHOCK BOYS

    Part documentary.

    Part infomercial.

    Part religious testimony.

    It chronicled every stage of their transformation—from obsessive collectors imprisoned by luxury to cheerful disciples liberated by resin, solar charging, and atomic time.

    Against every expectation, the film became a worldwide sensation.

    Clips flooded social media.

    Millions watched.

    Soon the men found themselves traveling the globe, not to discuss watches, but to explain the strange freedom that arrived only after they stopped believing that another purchase could save them.

    They still wore watches.

    They had simply stopped asking them to tell them who they were.

  • The Demon Lake and Heavenly Noodles

    The Demon Lake and Heavenly Noodles

    For the past two nights my subconscious has apparently dispensed with realism altogether and hired a surrealist screenwriter.

    The first dream began with an assignment that would have challenged even the most ambitious evolutionary biologist. I was ordered to travel millions of years into the past to locate one of my primordial ancestors—a prehistoric shark. Armed with nothing but a pair of pliers and inexplicable confidence, I extracted the shark’s razor-sharp teeth and painstakingly strung them into a necklace.

    This was no ordinary necklace.

    It had become my official faculty lanyard at the college where I teach.

    Somehow I lost it.

    The college president responded with the righteous fury usually reserved for embezzlement or plagiarism. She informed me that unless I journeyed back through evolutionary history, located the same prehistoric shark, and painstakingly reconstructed the necklace, I would be fired.

    The situation struck me as hopeless.

    How had I misplaced something so miraculous? How does one retrace one’s steps across millions of years? More importantly, how could anyone recreate a necklace that seemed less handcrafted than divinely manufactured? The shark’s teeth no longer felt like jewelry. They had become sacred relics, and I had managed to lose them somewhere between the Devonian Period and faculty parking.

    I awoke relieved that neither the necklace nor the disciplinary hearing had actually existed.

    Then came the following night.

    This time I found myself standing beside a dark lake surrounded by hundreds of people.

    Everyone issued the same warning.

    Do not disturb the water.

    A demon slept beneath the surface, they explained, and if awakened it would unleash unimaginable destruction upon us all.

    Unfortunately, I happened to be holding a very long stick.

    The human race has a long and distinguished history of ignoring good advice simply because the forbidden object happens to be within arm’s reach. Give Adam an apple, Pandora a box, or me a suspicious lake and an unnecessarily long pole, and curiosity will almost always defeat wisdom.

    Naturally, I stirred the water.

    The demon awoke.

    The earth shuddered. The air vibrated. Reality itself seemed to tremble as the creature announced its displeasure.

    People screamed.

    I was terrified.

    Yet there was one surprising consolation. I was frightened collectively rather than privately. Most of my nightmares isolate me inside my own panic, but this time hundreds of us shared the catastrophe. Terror, it turns out, becomes marginally more bearable when it has company.

    Eventually the demon grew bored with intimidating us and retreated once again into the depths.

    The dream then executed one of those abrupt transitions that only dreams consider perfectly logical.

    I stepped into an elevator.

    When the doors opened, I found myself in an ethereal kingdom devoted entirely to noodles.

    Not ordinary noodles.

    Transcendent noodles.

    Families, many of them from Taiwan, wandered the heavenly complex with unmistakable pride, as though civilization itself had culminated in this celestial noodle palace. They smiled with the quiet confidence of people who knew they possessed the finest cuisine in the universe.

    Hungry, I asked one family where I could find the noodle bar.

    Beaming, they pointed north.

    I confidently walked in precisely the direction that would ensure I never reached it.

    Instead, I became hopelessly lost, descended a spiral staircase, and somehow ended up asleep in the damp basement of a forgotten library.

    When I awoke inside the dream, I remembered the noodles.

    I was starving.

    Yet I had become too exhausted to climb back upstairs in search of them.

    So I settled for imagination.

    Unable to eat the heavenly noodles themselves, I pictured them so vividly that I convinced myself they might sustain me until I found the strength to move.

    Perhaps that final scene is the most revealing of all.

    Most of us spend our lives chasing some version of those heavenly noodles—peace, happiness, God, retirement, artistic achievement, perfect love, or simply the conviction that life has finally become what it was always meant to be. We receive directions. We begin confidently enough. Then we wander into the wrong corridor, descend a staircase we never intended to take, and wake up in the dusty basement of our own lives, too weary to continue.

    So we nourish ourselves with imagination until hope returns.

  • The Trapdoor Effect

    The Trapdoor Effect

    Alfred North Whitehead argued that religion arises from the desire to discover permanence in a transient world. Schopenhauer believed religion exists because we fear death. Tolstoy reached a more demanding conclusion. Death, he argued, forces us to make a choice: either surrender to despair or reshape our lives so that death cannot rob them of meaning. For Tolstoy, that reckoning culminated in religious conversion.

    Most of us encounter this reckoning in waves. There are seasons when mortality remains an abstraction, politely waiting its turn. Then there are moments when it barges through the front door and makes itself at home.

    The first time that happened to me was in 2004 with the death of football legend Reggie White. He had been born only a month after I was. At forty-three, he died from a cardiac arrhythmia related to sleep apnea. His death shook me, but I eventually regained my footing.

    Then came Lance Reddick.

    His death in 2023 hit me with far greater force. Reddick was sixty—my age. On screen he projected effortless authority. He played towering, intimidating police officers, wore a Tag Heuer as Chief Irvin Irving in Bosch, and somehow combined physical power with artistic refinement as an accomplished jazz pianist. He seemed built to endure. Seeing a man who embodied such strength simply vanish was profoundly disorienting. Nearly every day for the past three years, his death has crossed my mind.

    As if that weren’t enough, Facebook has become an obituary page for my adolescence.

    High school classmates—people who were posting vacation photos, political opinions, and pictures of their grandchildren only weeks earlier—suddenly reappear as memorial tributes. Healthy faces become framed portraits. Birthday wishes become eulogies. A life that looked perfectly ordinary on Tuesday has become a remembrance by Friday.

    The algorithm has quietly become an undertaker.

    Against that backdrop, my own routines begin to feel faintly absurd.

    There I am on my exercise bike, obsessed with burning exactly seven hundred calories in under an hour. I calculate how many grams of omega-3 a can of salmon will contribute to lunch. I debate whether next week’s garage workout should include walking lunges with twenty-pound kettlebells. I fine-tune my health strategy with the seriousness of a NASA engineer.

    And yet another part of me whispers that I am merely organizing deck chairs above a collapsing floor.

    At times I feel consumed by what I call The Trapdoor Effect: the unsettling awareness that beneath the routines of ordinary life—planning meals, exercising, paying bills, booking vacations, arguing over cholesterol, buying retirement clothes—lies an invisible trapdoor that may open without warning. We behave as though the future belongs to us, when in fact we possess nothing more than a reasonable expectation that tomorrow will resemble today.

    That expectation is comforting.

    It is also, perhaps, life’s most necessary illusion.