Cinemorphosis

Tag: europe

  • The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

    The Sandwich Shop of Eternal Regret

    Last night, I dreamed I retired too early, lost my tenure, and found myself cobbling together two humiliating jobs to survive. By day I was a part-time writing instructor, hustling between second-rate colleges. By night I was reduced to a takeout delivery boy for the sandwich shop where my wife cheerfully worked.

    If there was a silver lining, it was this: while waiting for her to assign me deliveries, I could pedal furiously on a stable of exercise bikes provided by the restaurant. Because, naturally, this wasn’t just a sandwich joint — it was part health club, part tourist mecca. At one point, a gaggle of Danish tourists descended, cackling in a booth for hours, treating the sandwich shop as though it were the Eiffel Tower of their itinerary.

    My wife flourished. She collaborated with the shop’s original owners, a warm couple from Hong Kong, brainstorming new sandwiches and ambitious upgrades, while I sweated like a condemned man on the bikes. Fortunately, I had a secret weapon: a dark brown leather jacket with supernatural properties. Each time I donned it before a delivery, every bead of sweat, every impurity, vanished as though I’d been baptized anew.

    But there was more. To scrape together a living, I also moonlighted in a third job — mysterious manual labor in a basement with a nameless partner. To reach this purgatory, I rode a bus into the “forbidden city,” a nightmare realm painted in muted oranges, where the architecture sulked in jagged, miserable shapes and its citizens were shackled to endless toil. It was a geometry lesson in despair.

    I was heartsick, regretting my decision to retire early. Only when the bus carried me back to the sandwich shop did relief arrive. There, I could mingle with long-lost friends and international tourists, ride the exercise bikes, and cling to the reassuring thought that my leather jacket would always purge me of sweat and shame.

  • Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    At nearly sixty-four, I still work out like a man who thinks death is watching from the corner of the garage, arms crossed, waiting to pounce the moment I skip a kettlebell swing. I train with the same primal urgency I felt at thirteen—when muscle equaled safety, and soreness meant I still mattered. I think about workouts. I talk about them. I bore people to death with unsolicited fitness manifestos. My obsessions are a carousel of age, mortality, exercise, oatmeal breakfasts, French-press coffee, and a pathological resistance to anything resembling leisure, especially vacations.

    Which brings me to now: it’s Sunday, and in a few hours my wife’s friend will drive us to LAX so we can board a United flight to Oahu. I should be thrilled. I’m not. I feel like a hostage in my own well-appointed life. I’m going only because family life requires the occasional sacrifice—and this is mine. A three-night stay at the Embassy Suites in Waikiki Beach. Palm trees. Breezes. Ocean sunsets. All of it unnerves me. I want to be helpful, gracious, even grateful—but I am a neurotic, OCD-addled man-child in a do-rag who agonizes every morning over which chunky diver watch to wear, like I’m prepping for surgery on the space-time continuum.

    I do not want to be the dead weight on this trip.

    Still, I try to prepare. My comfort rituals are in full swing. We’re packing two memory foam pillows because hotel pillows have the spinal integrity of a wet napkin. I created a “Travel Checklist” yesterday with over 30 items. My wife flagged two of them—Clorox gel and a scrub brush—and asked why I intended to pack janitorial supplies. “To disinfect the hotel shower,” I said. She told me I’m crazy. Scratch that from the list.

    We’ll land around eleven tonight, pick up the rental car, check in, visit ABC Store #38—because no Hawaii trip is complete without wandering into an ABC Store to buy bottled water, toothpaste, and the spiritual reassurance that you haven’t forgotten something vital. Then we’ll sync our devices to the hotel WiFi, maybe sit on the bed and stare blankly at the TV for twenty minutes before collapsing into our pancake pillows (if the foam ones failed to survive the suitcase crush). By the time I feel vaguely human, it will be midnight.

    And just like that, the countdown begins.

    We fly back Wednesday. Back to LAX. Back to my routine. By Thursday morning, I’ll be at Trader Joe’s shopping for groceries, then in the garage doing kettlebell swings to reassert my identity as a disciplined, slightly unhinged older man who treats a three-day vacation like a stint in exile.

    My wife’s friends raised their eyebrows when they heard how short the trip is. “That’s all my husband can take,” she told them. I felt seen and exposed all at once. It hit me while writing this: it really is a short trip. I feel guilty for being the reason we trimmed it down to a long weekend. And yet—I’m also relieved. Too much freedom, too much unstructured joy, and I begin to unravel. I need my routines. I need the Mothership. Without them, I drift.

    I’m reminded of a memoir I read nine years ago and plan to reread after this trip: An Abbreviated Life by Ariel Leve. It’s about surviving childhood under the tyranny of a narcissistic, chaotic mother. Leve writes with scalpel precision about how chronic trauma rewires the brain, how the child adapts with emotional detachment and hypervigilance, and how adulthood becomes a performance of normalcy built on damaged circuitry. Her memoir is unsentimental, razor-sharp, and achingly honest. I admire her. In some cracked mirror, I recognize myself.

    When I return from Oahu, I’ll dig up my old copy of her book. It’ll be the perfect homecoming gift—a reminder that healing is a long-haul flight, often with delays, turbulence, and very bad pillows.