Cinemorphosis

Tag: faith

  • Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    Spiritual Kitsch and the Muscle Gods of Sedona

    In the early 90s, my brother managed a spa restaurant at the Grand Wailea in Maui—a temple of eucalyptus steam and $18 cucumber water. His girlfriend, the head chef, ruled the kitchen with the calm authority of a health-conscious empress. I visited one summer and found myself one morning alone at breakfast, sipping coffee and trying to look like a man deep in thought rather than a tourist waiting on papaya boats.

    At the table next to mine sat a striking brunette with the kind of diamond on her finger that doubles as a paperweight. She started talking. To me. Boldly, intimately, as if we were two old conspirators.

    She was thirty-five, married, and bored. Grew up in Santa Monica. Modeled a little. Dabbled in chaos. Now she was married to a man forty years her senior—a retired Navy officer turned business tycoon currently swimming laps in the resort pool while his wife flirted with the help. She pointed out one of the servers, a freckled boy in his early twenties pouring her orange juice with the dreamy smile of a man about to be devoured.

    “I’m sleeping with him,” she said, as casually as if she were announcing she’d tried the papaya last time and found it too sweet.

    She spoke of her marriage like a real estate deal: mutually beneficial, emotionally vacant, and efficiently managed. Her husband financed her yoga retreats. She provided him with public companionship and discreet absence. After breakfast, she was off to a vegetarian cooking class to learn how to live forever.

    She told me she was researching longevity, obsessed with health, and that she was trying to convince her husband to move to Sedona, Arizona—“the best place in the country to live a long life,” she said.

    Back then, I filed Sedona away in the brain folder labeled someday. That place. The Holy Grail of Health. A desert Shangri-La where your body becomes pure and your soul gets exfoliated.

    I didn’t make it there until a few weeks ago.

    We drove in from Prescott, and I’ll admit it: the landscape is jaw-dropping. Red rock formations that looked carved by gods on steroids. Mountains with biceps. Cliffs that scowl. One ridge looked like Zeus doing a lat spread.

    Then we hit the town.

    One-lane highway. Organic restaurants. Shops selling mystical crystals and dreamcatchers made in China. Every storefront promising to “align your energy” or “awaken your inner light”—assuming you have a functioning credit card.

    We took a bus tour. The guide cheerfully explained that tech billionaires ship their Lamborghinis in on trucks just to drive them through town for a week of synchronized flexing, tantric massages, and moon-circle manifesting.

    The mysticism was so heavy-handed it became farce. At a matcha tea stand, a man with unblinking eyes dropped a sugar butterfly into my daughter’s drink and, with complete sincerity, instructed her to make a wish so the butterfly could “help it manifest.”

    That was the moment.

    That was when I realized I hated Sedona. Not the place—God no. The place is stunning. I hated the idea of Sedona.

    Sedona the place is geology and wonder.
    Sedona the idea is a branded hallucination.

    It’s the lie that you can downshift your soul into first gear while screaming through town in a Lamborghini. It’s the peacock strut of spiritual materialism—buying essential oils and amethyst pendants as if they’ll excuse the $5 million home and the $10 million ego inside it.

    Sedona wants you to believe you can live forever if you just buy enough gluten-free sage bundles and whisper affirmations into your Yeti thermos.

    The sugar butterfly? It’s not a wish. It’s a warning.

  • The Gospel According to the CEO: Why Work Became Worship

    The Gospel According to the CEO: Why Work Became Worship


    Antonio García Martínez, author of Chaos Monkeys and veteran of the tech world, argues that many recent college graduates, adrift without a guiding philosophy or any grounding in the psychological architecture of religion, redirect their spiritual hunger toward the workplace. In particular, they latch onto tech companies as secular stand-ins for organized faith. These firms offer more than a paycheck—they offer a sense of belonging, higher purpose, and the illusion of transcendence.

    The tech campus becomes a modern monastery, where the faithful eat, sleep, exercise, and labor. With its cappuccino bars, Michelin-level cafeterias, on-site laundry, yoga studios, wellness centers, and libraries, the workplace becomes not just a job, but a lifestyle. Employees live in an upgraded dormitory fantasy—one where comfort masks control.

    At the heart of this corporate spirituality is the CEO, the charismatic founder who plays the role of messiah. Workers are fed lofty slogans about “changing the world” and “disrupting paradigms” while toiling for long hours in service of a vision that often benefits only the top brass. The leader isn’t just admired—he’s revered. The Kool-Aid is organic, gluten-free, and laced with grandiosity.

    This phenomenon has become cultural fodder, explored with increasing skepticism in shows like Silicon Valley, Severance, WeCrashed, The Dropout, and Devs. Documentaries such as The Inventor, WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn, and Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened expose the blend of megalomania, fraud, and collective delusion behind these so-called missions.

    What drives this mass suspension of disbelief? Part of the answer lies in what Derek Thompson calls “Workism”—the belief that one’s job is the core of one’s identity and life’s meaning. Combined with groupthink and CEO idolatry, Workism completes a trifecta of modern manipulation. In this new faith, the altar is a standing desk, and salvation is just one IPO away.

  • The Watch Hoarder’s Purge

    The Watch Hoarder’s Purge

    Chapter Five from The Watch Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    “You look miserable,” the Watch Master said, peering into the void of his backyard as we sat beneath a star-punched sky.

    “You can see me? It’s pitch black out here.”

    “I don’t need to see you. I can feel the gravitational pull of your despair. You’re radiating existential dread.”

    “That’s because you’ve assigned me an impossible task. Sell all my watches… and keep only one.”

    “Baby steps, Cassandra.”

    At that moment, a neighbor’s cat slinked in like a ghost, coiled around the Master’s ankle, and began purring like a smug little engine. He ignored it entirely.

    “You need to begin The Purge.”

    “The Purge? You mean like that movie where people commit murder once a year?”

    “No, not that kind of purge. Though honestly, your collection could use a bloodletting. I’m talking about the soul-cleansing purge. A lifestyle exfoliation. You can’t amputate your horological addiction in one go. You’ve got to build momentum. Start with the dead weight in your life.”

    He took a slow sip from a chipped mug of lukewarm coffee and gently nudged the cat away with the practiced detachment of a man who has done this a hundred times.

    “Begin,” he said, “with your eWaste.”

    “My what?”

    “You heard me. Don’t pretend you’re not hoarding defunct electronics like some midlife tech raccoon. Old flat-screens, fossilized laptops, bargain-bin Bluetooth speakers, cracked tablets, prehistoric printers, derelict keyboards—stuff that died during the Bush administration.”

    “I have… some things,” I admitted, blood draining from my face.

    “Take it all to an eWaste center. Feel the rush. The purity. Like dominoes tipping, you’ll get hooked on getting rid of things. And before long, those watches will start looking like ankle weights chained to your past.”

    A wave of dizziness came over me.

    The Master raised an eyebrow. “What now?”

    “Everything you’re saying is true. And I think I’m going to faint.”

    He shrugged with the lazy grace of a man who’d long since graduated from giving a damn. “Change or don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm. But if you’re still clutching that broken Casio from 2009 like it’s a family heirloom, maybe it’s time to rethink your priorities.”

    He stretched his limbs and let out an operatic yawn. Just then, a massive crow descended on the fence post, tilted its head like a Greek oracle, and let out a guttural, gravelly call: “Puuurge. Puuurge. Puuurge.”

    The Master didn’t flinch. He simply glanced at the bird and muttered, “Everyone wants a line in this story.”

    And with that, he dismissed me into the night—to wrestle with my demons and the unbearable burden of excess.

  • The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    The Mole Woman Prophecy and the Gospel of Groats

    Last night I dreamed I was a mid-level drone in a sleek, glassy corporate tower, the kind where the espresso is artisanal but the moral rot is industrial grade. My friend John, a man of questionable appetites, had conducted an ill-advised workplace affair with a pale, mole-flecked woman who looked like Tina Louise if she’d been exhumed from a Victorian tomb. The office scorned her, and by association, John had become persona non grata. Worse, the affair had left him with a gastrointestinal affliction—proof, apparently, of both his guilt and poor judgment.

    My boss, a mustached bureaucrat whose entire personality could be summed up as “nonstick,” summoned me to his office. With the casual menace of a man ordering a sandwich, he instructed me to write up John. Not for the affair, mind you—that would be too human—but for the stomach condition. It was, he explained, an external manifestation of moral decay. HR, he added blandly, would now monitor John’s “future movements.” Orwell would’ve blushed.

    Instead of complying, I wandered over to the mole-riddled femme fatale. As we spoke, her moles seemed to multiply like a corrupted Photoshop clone stamp tool—deepening, darkening, replicating. I felt a twinge of pity, but mostly revulsion, and an impending fear that I’d soon be ordered to file a medical report on her as the first step in her “quiet dismissal.”

    I excused myself and found John, whose flat affect suggested either Zen detachment or full-blown delusion. He shrugged off the HR inquisition and announced, with the conviction of a man four bourbons deep, that the boss would soon be fired and that he would lead the company into a new era. He was the messiah of office reform, apparently, and his gastrointestinal bug was just a minor martyrdom.

    Then I woke up. I padded to the kitchen, made my usual overnight buckwheat groats, and watched in disgust as the microwave turned into a groats splatter crime scene. I was done. No more splatter. It was time for a change. A prophet had spoken—probably me—and I obeyed by ordering a $145 Staub cast iron cocotte. Sure, it’s wildly expensive for boiling breakfast grains, but I now had divine justification: a dream packed with plague, prophecy, and intestinal punishment.

    Sometimes, self-delusion makes the best retail therapy.

  • The Tech Lord and the Gospel of Obsolescence

    The Tech Lord and the Gospel of Obsolescence

    Last night I dreamed I was helping my daughter with her homework in the middle of a public square. A chaotic, bustling arena. Think Roman forum meets tech dystopia. We had two laptops perched on a white concrete ledge high above a stadium of descending steps, as if we were doing calculus on the lip of a coliseum.

    The computers were a mess—two laptops yoked together like resentful twins, their settings morphing by the second. Screens flashed blue, then white, then black. Sometimes yellow cartoon ducks floated lazily across the bottom like deranged pop-up ads from a children’s game. I wasn’t so much solving her homework as performing tech triage on possessed machines.

    I wasn’t panicked because I couldn’t help her. I was panicked because someone might see that I couldn’t help her. Vanity, thy name is Dad.

    People walked past, utterly unfazed. Apparently, homework over a stadium chasm with dueling laptops and malfunctioning duck animations was standard urban behavior.

    Then a young man—a peripheral character from some former life—told me there was a “tech lord” nearby. Not tech support. A tech lord. Naturally, I followed.

    The tech lord’s lair was a dim room centered around a massive table, cathedral-like in tone and purpose. He was listening to the Bible—read aloud by the famous comedian George Carlin. Not a solemn voice or trained narrator, but someone best known for punchlines and pratfalls. And the tech lord was rapt. He cradled a thick, black Bible like a sacred talisman, proclaiming that this was the finest biblical performance art ever conceived.

    I tried to get in a word about my tech problem, but he interrupted me and asked me what my favorite book in the Bible was. I said the Book of Job, of course. He seemed satisfied with my response and allowed me to continue with my inquiry. 

    When I mentioned the malfunctioning laptops, he waved it off like someone refusing to answer a question about taxes. “You’ll need to get rid of both machines,” he intoned, “and buy a new one.”

    Naturally, I flirted with the idea of going full Apple—titanium chic, smug perfection—but quickly sobered up. Apple or Windows, it’s the same headache in a different tuxedo. I settled for a sleek black Windows laptop, and with a sudden, magical poof, there it was in my hands. The new device of promise. The Messiah machine.

    I returned to my daughter, still huddled over her rebellious duo. I tried to shut them down, ceremonially, like a general dismissing insubordinate troops. They refused. The screens flared defiantly. They would not go quietly into obsolescence. They had become conscious, bitter, undead.

    And then I woke up.

    The kicker? Just before bed, my wife gave me a task: drive 30 minutes to San Pedro with a car full of broken electronics and deliver them to an e-waste center. My subconscious, clearly, had feelings about this and delivered me this dream as a prelude to my task.

    One final note about the dream: the pairing of George Carlin and the Bible triggered a memory of a dream I had in the early ’90s. In that dream, the Messiah wasn’t a robed figure of spiritual gravity—he was Buddy Hackett, the goofy-faced, gravel-voiced comic best known for squinting through punchlines. There he was, standing atop a Hollywood hotel, delivering what I could only assume was divine revelation—or maybe just the world’s strangest stand-up set. I couldn’t tell if he was inspired, intoxicated, or both.

    Now, three decades later, George Carlin shows up in a dream to read Scripture aloud with messianic intensity, joining Hackett in a growing pantheon of prophetic clowns. It makes a strange kind of sense. Both comedians and prophets stand at the edge of civilization, pointing fingers at the absurdities we refuse to question. They use hyperbole, irony, and parable to slice through the world’s lazy thinking. The difference? Prophets get canonized. Comedians get heckled.

    But maybe, just maybe, it’s the same job with a different mic.s a prelude to my task.

  • The Forgiveness Trap: When Healing Becomes a Performance

    The Forgiveness Trap: When Healing Becomes a Performance

    I remember listening to Terry Gross interview Frank McCourt in 1997, right as Angela’s Ashes was climbing every bestseller list like a starving Irish ghost with a publishing deal. At one point, Gross asked the inevitable soft-serve question: had he ever forgiven his drunken, absentee father for drinking away the family’s money and abandoning his wife and children to starvation and shame?

    McCourt didn’t flinch. He dismissed forgiveness as “pompous” and “irrelevant”—as if someone had asked him if he’d made peace with bubonic plague. He wasn’t being cruel; he was being precise. Forgiveness, he seemed to argue, is often a performance—a neat, moral bow tied onto a box of horror that refuses to stay shut.

    I thought of McCourt again this morning while reading Christina Caron’s New York Times piece, “Sometimes, Forgiveness Is Overrated.” It profiles adults who survived childhoods ruled by sadists, addicts, psychopaths, and the emotionally vacant. These were not flawed parents; they were ethical sinkholes, incapable of even the most basic decency. And yet, the self-help gospel continues to hand these survivors a soft-focus script: Forgive, and you will be free.

    Enter Amanda Gregory, therapist and author of You Don’t Need to Forgive: Trauma Recovery on Your Own Terms. Gregory’s argument is refreshingly grounded: forgiveness is not a virtue badge, not a finish line, and certainly not a moral obligation. It’s a slow, private emotional process—if you choose to pursue it. You do not owe a resolution. You do not need to sculpt your rage into affection.

    Gregory’s thesis echoes Sharon Lamb’s earlier work from 2002, which cautioned that pressuring victims to forgive can cause more damage than healing. It’s not just naive—it’s cruel. There are wounds that never close, and forcing someone to say, “It’s okay now,” when it’s absolutely not okay is a kind of spiritual gaslighting. It shifts the burden of transformation onto the person who’s already been broken.

    And what about the offenders? If they’re remorseful, truly remorseful, perhaps forgiveness enters the room. But what if they’re not? What if they’re still rewriting history or refusing to acknowledge it? Then forgiveness becomes a farce—just another round of victim-blaming wrapped in therapeutic jargon.

    In many cases, forgiveness isn’t even the right frame. With time and growth, some of us develop a different emotional posture—not forgiveness, but pity. We see our abusers not as villains to be vanquished or souls to be redeemed, but as feeble, morally bankrupt husks who couldn’t rise above their own dysfunction. We stop hating them because we no longer need to—but let’s not confuse that with forgiveness. That’s not healing; it’s emotional Darwinism.

    Forgiveness has its place, but only when it rests on shared truth and genuine contrition. Otherwise, it’s a forced ritual, a bad-faith moral contract, and a way to sell books or fill up therapy time. The therapeutic industry’s insistence that forgiveness is always the holy grail? Honestly, it’s unforgivable.

  • Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    In the early ’90s, I had a student whose entire identity was shackled to the number on a stadiometer. I don’t recall the exact figure, but he was somewhere south of five-foot-five—a detail that tormented him like a Greek curse. What I do remember is that he was a strikingly handsome kid. Slender, well-proportioned, with the kind of face you’d expect to see in a Calvin Klein ad, not in a therapy session about height insecurity. But none of that mattered. He couldn’t see past the measuring tape in his head.

    It was during one of our writing lab sessions—those clattering dens of early-’90s Macintoshes, all beige and humming, where I played roving editor and motivational coach—that he confided in me. Class was winding down, students trickling out like post-cardio gym rats, and this nineteen-year-old lingered behind with something heavy to unload.

    He told me that being short felt like a life sentence. But the real damage, he confessed, came not from his height—but from the manic overcompensation it inspired. When talking in groups, he’d find the highest available perch to stand on—benches, stairs, anything to give him the illusion of height. He wore shoe lifts, which he kept hidden in his closet like a box of shame. But worst of all? He trained himself to walk perpetually on his tiptoes.

    Yes, tiptoes. Every day, every step. As if sneaking through life as a burglar of inches.

    Eventually, his spine cried uncle. The tiptoe act wrecked his back, forced him into surgery, and—here’s the gut punch—cost him an entire inch. In his effort to stretch himself, he ended up shorter. He admitted he hated himself for it, and I believed him.

    Looking at him—this good-looking, intelligent kid—it struck me just how dangerous our internal narratives can be. We live so much in our heads that our perception becomes more powerful than reality. A stray comment in middle school morphs into a life-defining trauma. A mirror becomes a courtroom. And the verdict? Never good enough.

    His story is a tragic little parable of body dysmorphia: how the seeds of insecurity, if left unchecked, sprout into weeds that choke reason, and in our desperate attempts to “fix” ourselves, we often end up disfiguring what was never broken.

    Our bodies are our canvases. And oh, how savagely the world critiques them. Some of us starve. Some inject ourselves with synthetic youth. Some spend fortunes on surgeries that leave us looking like Botoxed sphinx cats. And some, like my student, ruin their spines to gain half an inch that no one but they ever noticed.

    We’re all vulnerable to the feedback loop. When I’m lean and muscular on YouTube, the algorithm sings. I get compliments. DMs. Admiring questions about my training and my “age-defying” lifestyle. When I’m twenty pounds heavier? Crickets. I become one more bloated has-been talking into the void.

    Yes, our bodies are our canvas. But if we’re not careful, our efforts to “improve” that canvas can become self-mutilation masquerading as self-love.

  • The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    The Camel, the Needle, and the Man Who Had Too Much

    I like to be financially comfortable—let’s not lie. I like having gravy money: the kind you drizzle over an already-satisfying existence just to make it rich, indulgent, and entirely unnecessary. A decadent dinner, a silly watch, a rare Japanese radio I’ll only use twice—it’s not about need. It’s about comfort laced with a whiff of thrill. But every time I partake, I’m haunted by that grim little proverb: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.

    The older I get, the more I suspect that money is only part of the problem. The real barrier to heaven isn’t wealth—it’s pleasure. Or more precisely, the addiction to pleasure. Call it spiritual insulin resistance: too much sweetness, too often, until nothing satisfies and everything corrupts.

    A more accurate update to the proverb might be: It is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a pleasured man to get into heaven.

    By “pleasured,” I mean a man gorged on delight—hedonistic, unrestrained, swimming in his own self-curated fantasies. A man whose moral compass has rusted from disuse. And when I think of that kind of dissipation, I’m haunted by a story one of my students told me in the early ’90s—an unforgettable parable dressed up as a locker room anecdote.

    This student was a soccer player who spent a season with a club team in Italy. One of his teammates, an American, was almost offensively beautiful: tall, tan, muscular, with a jawline that could slice through marble and hair that obeyed no gravity. When the season ended, he refused to return home. He stayed. He found a nude beach. He became, in every sense of the word, The Stallion.

    Locals called him that without irony. He strutted the shoreline like a marble statue sprung to life. Women adored him, men envied him, and he lived the fantasy to its fullest: a gigolo in linen pants and nothing else. At first, it was all sun-kissed pleasure and consequence-free sex. But then came the rot.

    Somewhere along the way, he crossed an invisible line. He stopped caring about the actual act of intimacy. His addiction mutated. It was no longer about pleasure—it was about being desired. He would stand in clubs in a sheer white shirt, unbuttoned to the naval, chest gleaming, waiting for women to approach. When they did, he would reject them. The proposal was enough. The look in their eyes? That was his fix.

    Eventually, he went mad. His personality fractured like overused glass. When my student returned to Italy months later, he found The Stallion pacing the same beach—sun-kissed, glistening, and vacant. He didn’t recognize his former teammate. He walked past him with a thousand-mile stare, a ghost trapped in flesh, wandering his personal Eden turned hellscape. The pleasure that once adorned his life had hollowed it out from the inside.

    He had reached The Point of No Return.

    And every time I reach for a little unnecessary luxury—something shiny, excessive, self-soothing—I think of him. The Stallion. Proof that there’s such a thing as too much beauty, too much indulgence, too much affirmation. He wasn’t rich. But he was pleasured. And that might be even more dangerous.

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    The Gospel According to Dad: A Parable of Rocks, Regret, and Cabernet

    I was sixteen. My parents were recently divorced. Once a month, I’d visit my father at his swanky apartment and we’d discuss my future.

    One night, my father stared at me across the dinner table, a slab of rare steak leaking its red juices into a mountain of mashed potatoes. He squinted, as if trying to determine whether I was his son or a lost philosophy major who’d wandered in from a patchouli-scented commune.

    “So,” he said, carving off a bloody corner, “what are your career plans?”

    I gave him the truth. “Not totally sure, but I’m leaning toward philosophy.”

    He dropped his knife like I’d just confessed to joining a nudist circus. “Why in the hell would you want to do a thing like that?”

    “The search for meaning,” I said.

    He snorted and chased his chew with a gulp of red wine, as if meaninglessness required lubrication. “Don’t waste your time.”

    “Meaning is a waste of time?”

    He wiped his mouth like he was preparing to deliver a TED Talk from the underworld. “Let me tell you a little story.”

    And then came one of Dad’s home-brewed parables—equal parts whiskey, cynicism, and divine apathy:

    “A young man, about your age, stood on a beach and looked up at the heavens. ‘God,’ he said, ‘help me find meaning.’ And God, being the cosmic wiseass that He is, replied, ‘Look at all the rocks around you. One of them has the meaning of life written on it. Go find it.’ The young man looked around—millions of rocks—and said, ‘But God, that’ll take forever.’ And God said, ‘That’s your problem, not mine.’”

    I already regretted everything.

    “Decades passed. The man turned over every rock. He aged like a leather shoe abandoned in the desert. No inscription. He grew sunburned, brittle, and spiritually constipated. Finally, in his nineties, he looked up at the sky, trembling with rage, and shouted, ‘God! I’ve been faithful! No pleasure, no joy, no Netflix—just rock-flipping! And I found nothing!’”

    Dad leaned in, eyes gleaming.

    “And God said: ‘That’s right, you dumb shit. Now die.’”

    There was a silence. Even the mashed potatoes seemed stunned.

    I blinked. “Where in the hell did you hear that story?”

    He leaned back, smug as a snake on a warm rock. “Made it up. For your benefit.”

    “My benefit? What am I supposed to take from this bleak little fable?”

    He ticked the lessons off like commandments: “One, God doesn’t give a shit. Two, there is no meaning. Three, stop thinking so damn much and just live your life.”

    “Easy for you to say,” I muttered. “Cruising around in your fancy car, living in your swanky bachelor pad, drinking overpriced wine.”

    “Worry not, my son,” he said, swirling his cabernet like it owed him rent. “You’ll get yours someday.”

    “So you’ve found paradise?”

    He shrugged. “Far from it. But it’s got central air. And that’ll have to do.”