Cinemorphosis

Tag: family

  • When Your Bodybuilding Past Still Haunts You

    When Your Bodybuilding Past Still Haunts You

    Last night I dreamed I was illegally transporting a piano.

    This was not a metaphorical illegality. It was a regulatory one. The kind involving helpers, permits, and fines. According to Dream Law, moving a piano required two assistants. I only had one. If caught, I’d be cited. Possibly shamed. I loaded the piano anyway—my beautiful, expensive ebony instrument—into the back of an open truck and drove it from the Bay Area to Southern California, white-knuckled and guilty, like a man smuggling contraband Chopin.

    I was living, temporarily, on a compound owned by a vaguely unsavory man. He was tall, pinch-faced, and always wore a blue suit, the uniform of people who know things you don’t want to know. He had the aura of a community fixer—part mentor, part hustler, part moral hazard. He gave me piano lessons, encouraged me to keep lifting weights, and introduced me to restaurants with the enthusiasm of someone laundering taste through generosity. 

    On the day I was supposed to leave, my anxiety peaked. Rain was coming. The piano sat exposed in the truck bed like a sacrificial offering. One good storm and the ebony would swell, crack, die. I panicked. The trickster waved it off. Go eat lunch, he said. By the time you’re done, the rain might stop. This was either sage advice or the kind of line uttered by men who profit from delay.

    I drove to a nearby restaurant. It was mobbed. People stood outside drinking champagne as if waiting for a table were a lifestyle choice. Inside, servers were popping bottles at a frantic pace—corks flying, foam spilling, the atmosphere halfway between celebration and collapse.

    Then I saw it.

    Mounted beside the menu was a massive poster advertising a local bodybuilding exhibition. And there I was. Not the man I am now. Not the sixty-four-year-old who qualifies for senior discounts and considers fiber intake a moral issue. This was me in my mid-twenties: thick, swollen, carved out of stubborn protein and vanity. A human monument to leg day. I was the marquee attraction.

    The trickster, it turned out, had signed me up to pose in a bodybuilding exhibition without telling me.

    How did he know I’d be staying long enough to star in this marquee event? How did he know the rain would delay me? How did he still have a photo of a body I no longer inhabited? 

    When the diners saw me standing outside, recognition rippled through the room. Glasses paused midair. Heads turned. Then applause broke out. Cheers. My name—my old name—chanted with conviction. I tried to explain. I gestured at my face, my posture, the subtle collapse of time. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t that man anymore. That I now stretch before standing. That I wake up injured. That my biggest competition is inflammation.

    They refused to listen.

    The cheering swallowed my protests. Reality bent. And I understood, I would be showing up to that exhibition—dragging with me a body, an identity, and a past I no longer owned, but which apparently still had bookings.

  • I Forgot the Song, But the Song Didn’t Forget Me

    I Forgot the Song, But the Song Didn’t Forget Me

    Last night I dreamed I was attending an English Department meeting held, for reasons no dream ever explains, in a recreation room with an adjoining outdoor patio. The setting suggested morale had once been a priority, sometime around 1987.

    Inside the rec room, my friend S pressed a pair of earbuds into my hand. They were attached—not metaphorically, but literally—to a CD, which already felt like an archaeological artifact.
    “Do you know this song?” she asked.

    The music was exquisite. Airy. Radiant. It carried that dangerous quality of being both unfamiliar and deeply known, as if it had once lived inside me and quietly moved out without leaving a forwarding address. I admitted I didn’t recognize it.

    She looked at me with the gentlest possible contempt.
    “You burned this for me ten years ago.”

    I felt properly humiliated. Not embarrassed—abased. As if I’d forgotten the name of a childhood friend or my own middle initial. Then she summoned the band’s leader the way dreams do—no door, no introduction, just a man appearing fully formed.

    He was in his late forties, courteous, faintly exhausted, with the posture of someone who has spent years loading gear into vans at 2 a.m. I apologized to him for not recognizing his work. I blamed streaming—how it turns music into sonic wallpaper, a perpetual ambient fog where nothing has to be remembered because everything is always available. In a fit of dream-piety, I vowed to delete every streaming account I owned and return to vinyl, to sacred listening, to LPs spinning on absurdly expensive turntables like a penitent monk.

    He nodded shyly, as if he’d heard this promise before, and vanished.

    The departmental meeting began outside on the patio, but I lingered inside the rec room instead. I changed into a swimsuit for reasons that felt urgent at the time. I ate snacks—salty, comforting, vaguely institutional—and watched my colleagues through the glass as they discussed the usual bullet points: outcomes, alignment, initiatives. I meant to join them. Truly. But the snacks induced a narcotic drowsiness, and I collapsed onto a yellow beanbag chair like a defeated child at a daycare center. I fell asleep.

    When I woke, the meeting was still going on.

    Wrapped in a towel over my bathing suit, I finally wandered outside. My younger colleagues informed me I needed to sign the attendance sheet to get my FLEX hours. Unfortunately, the sign-up sheet had already been placed in a wooden box and sent to Human Resources, which in dream logic felt ominous and final, like evidence sealed in a cold case.

    The secretary waved it off. She would “put me in the system.”

    I thanked her. The meeting droned on. Words floated by without meaning. And all I could think about was that music—its beauty, its ache, its brief visitation. And then, with a second, sharper jolt of recognition, I realized I had forgotten it again.

    The song.
    The band.

    Gone.

  • The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    Five mornings a week, I work out in my garage—kettlebells clanging, yoga mat unrolled, joints negotiating a ceasefire. The soundtrack is Larry Mantle on LAist 89.3 FM, broadcasting from Pasadena. This matters because Torrance is not Pasadena, and 89.3 is a notoriously fragile signal here. It fades, ghosts, sulks. Catching it cleanly is less a matter of tuning than of faith.

    Then there’s the noise. Torrance mornings are an industrial symphony: garbage trucks reversing, leaf blowers screaming like jet engines, lawnmowers revving, cars tearing past as if late for something existential. Any garage radio that can’t project authority is immediately demoted to paperweight.

    I briefly considered going big—dropping $300 on a Tecsun S-8800 field radio, a machine that looks like it should come with a government-issued lanyard. But after cycling a parade of smaller radios through the garage, I landed—almost sheepishly—on the Qodosen DX-286. And it has been an ambush.

    On FM, the Qodosen is a brute. It grabs 89.3 at full strength and refuses to let go. Its 3-watt speaker is loud without being cruel, present without being shrill. Placed in just the right corner of the garage, away from interference, it becomes a small, defiant monument to good engineering. Unfettered, it sings.

    The most embarrassing part is that I once returned it.

    I didn’t trust it. An $80 radio performing this well felt like a trick. Too good to be true. I convinced myself it was a short-lived overachiever—high performance, early death. So I sent it back and went crawling to my more expensive radios: the Tecsun PL-660, the PL-680. Fine machines. Respectable. And yet, one by one, they lost the FM battle and the speaker war.

    The absence of the Qodosen grew louder than the radios I owned.

    Eight months ago, I rebought it, tail between my legs. It has been my garage companion ever since. Morning after morning, it cuts through the din and delivers Larry Mantle like clockwork. Kettlebells swing. Downward dogs are held. The signal holds.

    Sometimes the best gear isn’t the one with the most gravitas or the highest price tag. Sometimes it’s the small, stubborn box you didn’t believe in—until it refused to be ignored.

  • The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading questions early and found myself with a full hour to kill. So I did what any quietly restless child with access to art paper would do: I drew a gigantic submarine.

    It was glorious. The hull bristled with portal windows, and inside each window lived a tiny, talkative world. Every occupant had something urgent to say. One man was making pancakes and inviting others over. A woman, her hair set in curlers, announced she was in no condition to be seen. Another guy sulked over a bowl of cereal because the box promised a free toy and delivered nothing. Someone tried to nap in a hammock but complained about the noise. A girl had a strip of apple skin lodged between her teeth and was losing her mind over it. There were at least a dozen such figures—boasting, whining, confessing, performing.

    It was a floating anthology of minor human grievances.

    I was proud of it. I felt like I was getting valuable training for my future career writing for Mad Magazine. I was quiet. I was finished with my work. I was bothering no one.

    Then Mrs. Eckhart appeared.

    She moved down the aisle between desks, paused, and studied my drawing. I waited for praise—some acknowledgment of creativity, wit, talent. Instead, I got disdain. Her red hair was stacked into a bouffant, her eyebrows arched in judgment.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

    “But I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was working quietly.”

    She ignored that and began reading my dialogue bubbles aloud, dripping sarcasm into every line. The class erupted in laughter—not the good kind, the kind that comes from watching someone get filleted by authority.

    Then she delivered the verdict.

    “Your parents should know how you’re spending your time in my classroom.”

    She flipped the page over and wrote a note explaining my offense. I was to take it home, secure parental signatures, and return it like evidence.

    That evening, after dinner, I showed my father the drawing.

    He was livid.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

    “I don’t know why,” I said. “I finished my work. I was quiet.”

    “It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

    “I don’t get it.”

    “By finishing early and doodling, you implied her work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

    “But I didn’t say anything. I just drew.”

    “It doesn’t matter if you’re right,” he said. “What matters is you made her angry. In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought those were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Go to your room. Write her an apology.”

    I wrote the apology. But even then, I knew—deep down—I had done nothing wrong. In fact, to this day, that submarine remains the best use of time I ever managed in her class.

    The truth was simple: Mrs. Eckhart didn’t like me. I was brooding, inward, melancholic. She sensed something in me she found intolerable. Once, after she criticized a homework assignment, I tried to explain myself.

    “You have an excuse for everything, don’t you?” she snapped.

    If all my teachers had felt that way, I might accept the diagnosis. But they didn’t. Every other teacher thought I was polite, attentive, fine. There was something specific between us that never resolved.

    Sometimes hostility is not psychological; it’s biblical. It has no cause, no logic, no cure.

    I think of the excellent movie The Banshees of Inisherin. Colm abruptly ends his friendship with Padraic. No grievance. No inciting incident. “I just don’t like you anymore.” That’s it. Padraic hasn’t changed. Colm simply finds him unbearable.

    After nearly forty years of teaching, I know this pattern well. I’ve been popular, well-liked, even beloved by students—but that hasn’t spared me the occasional student who radiated pure contempt. Once, friendly students asked if I noticed a guy in the back who glowered at me all semester. I told them yes. Every so often, someone decides you are intolerable. There is no appeal process.

    In those cases, effort only makes things worse. Trying to win favor intensifies the repulsion. The Chinese phrase captures it perfectly: mei ban fa—nothing can be done.

    Do I resent Mrs. Eckhart? A little. She was an authority figure with a visceral dislike for a ten-year-old boy. But what endures most isn’t bitterness. It’s joy.

    That submarine was alive. It was funny. It was mine. No note home, no scolding, no pinch-faced teacher can take that away.

  • Losing My Classroom Key and Finding the End of the World

    Losing My Classroom Key and Finding the End of the World

    Twenty-six years ago, I lost my classroom key at a university. This was not treated as a minor inconvenience. It was treated as a moral failure.

    I was summoned before a college administrator whose demeanor suggested I had been caught shoplifting ideas from Plato. She informed me—slowly, with relish—that the one thing a college instructor does not do is lose his key. She scanned me from head to toe the way a customs agent inspects a suitcase that smells faintly of contraband. My carelessness, she implied, had finally revealed my true identity: a professional bum, a sloth masquerading as an educator, a man unfit to shepherd students through anything more complex than a vending machine.

    Once she had finished anatomizing my character, I asked—meekly—how one went about replacing a lost key.

    “You don’t just get a replacement,” she said. “It’s a process.”

    The word process landed like a sentence.

    She explained that I would need to drive to a remote outpost on the edge of campus called Plant-Ops. There, I would meet a locksmith. I would give him my personal information and twenty dollars in cash. No check. No receipt. The arrangement sounded less like facilities management and more like a back-alley transaction involving counterfeit passports.

    “How will I know who the locksmith is?” I asked.

    “You’ll know him,” she said. “He’s the only person there.”

    “What’s the place called again?”

    “Plant-Ops.”

    I repeated the name aloud, hoping to brand it into my memory. She looked at me as one looks at a child who has accidentally set fire to a jungle gym and informed me that I was dismissed.

    Shamed and slightly afraid, I drove east from campus. The pavement gave way to dirt, then rubble, then something that barely qualified as a road. My car bucked and rattled as I passed cow skulls bleaching in the sun and tumbleweeds drifting like omens. Buzzards circled overhead. I was no longer in Southern California. I had crossed into a grim pocket dimension where entropy had been fast-forwarded and everything was quietly rehearsing its own ending. If someone had told me I would die there, I would not have argued.

    At last, I reached Plant-Ops: a dilapidated hangar that looked one strong gust away from becoming a weather event. Inside stood the locksmith. He was short, grouchy, bespectacled, and gaunt, with a bushy mustache and a few desperate strands of black hair clinging to his bald skull. He wore a grease-splattered apron. Wind howled through the corrugated metal walls, and I half-expected the structure to lift off and spin into the sky like Dorothy’s house.

    The man stood over a battered wooden workbench, glaring at me while eating cold SpaghettiOs straight from the can. His eyes bulged with irritation. My presence had clearly ruined his meal. Worse, it confirmed his theory of the world: incompetents abound, and today one had wandered into his hangar.

    I explained that I had lost my key. I apologized as though I had personally engineered his inconvenience. He demanded twenty dollars in cash—up front—made the key, and then leaned in to warn me that he was retiring soon. His replacement, he said, was a complete idiot, incapable of making a functional key. I took this prophecy seriously.

    I fled the hangar, drove directly to a hardware store, and purchased a Kevlar keychain with a tether reel, a high-density nylon belt loop, and enough industrial reinforcement to secure a small boat. From that day forward, my keys were attached to my body like an ankle monitor.

    I have done worse things in my life—objectively worse—but for reasons I still don’t fully understand, losing that key put me briefly at odds with the universe. I had been consigned to a shame dungeon, escaped it by the skin of my teeth, and sworn never to return.

  • I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

    I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

    This morning, as I brushed my teeth and my daughters gathered their backpacks for the drive to school, I stared into the mirror and took inventory. There it was: a respectable gash carved into the crown of my nose. A souvenir. A reminder of last night’s three-hour descent into domestic warfare.

    The catalyst was banal. For reasons known only to entropy, the American Standard elongated toilet seat in my daughters’ bathroom had cracked. I bought a replacement immediately. Then I let it sit in my office for two weeks, radiating quiet menace. I told myself the job would be simple. My instincts told me it would be biblical.

    My instincts were correct.

    The hinge bolts on top were buried beneath a geological formation of rust. The plastic wing nuts underneath were no better—coated in a crusty patina that suggested they had been forged during the Eisenhower administration. First, I scraped and cleaned. Then I sprayed. Then I tried to loosen. Nothing moved. The bolts might as well have been welded to the bowl.

    So I escalated. Tools came out. Space disappeared. The cabinet loomed. There was no leverage, no angle, no dignity. I hammered. I wedged a flathead screwdriver against the bolt and struck it like I was trying to extract a confession. I attacked the wing nut with a wrench. Forty-five minutes passed. Sweat pooled. Hope thinned.

    I called my best friend’s son, a preternaturally calm handyman with three young children screaming in the background. We FaceTimed. He studied the situation and said, serenely, “You’re going to twist the bottom bolt back and forth like a paperclip. Eventually it’ll snap.”

    I thanked him and wedged myself beneath the toilet, contorting my body into a shape last attempted during Cold War espionage. I twisted. I rocked. At one point, my locking pliers slipped and I punched myself in the face, opening up my nose like a badly sealed envelope. Blood. Rage. Progress: none.

    An hour had passed. I had mutilated one plastic wing nut into modern art. While I was assessing my wound in the mirror, my wife calmly removed the right wing nut. Half the job was done.

    The left side, however, had ideas.

    Two more hours vanished. Every tool failed. The space was tighter. My left shoulder—home to a torn rotator cuff—began to flare. Each push sent a warning shot of inflammation through my arm. I was exhausted. I was furious. I was within a centimeter of victory and flirting with surrender.

    And then the thought arrived, dark and unforgivable: Call a plumber.

    He would charge $150. He would finish in three minutes. He would charge $150 even if I stood there and wept. The fact that I had already invested two hours, blood, and cartilage made calling him impossible. Layered on top of that was wounded masculinity. Sixty-four years old. Fit. A lifetime of lifting. I could not—would not—summon a professional to do a man’s job while I watched.

    Fueled by pride and spite, I ripped the toilet seat free, gaining better access but no relief. Then, in a moment of clarity bordering on madness, I reached for the wire-cutting pliers. I attacked the plastic wing nut with savage intent. Shards flew. The nut began to yield. This was not finesse. This was attrition.

    Three hours in, shoulder inflamed, nose split, I finished the job.

    What will I do next time? I will spend $99 on a Dremel with a cut-off wheel and end the ordeal in five minutes. That’s what I’ll do. When it comes to home repairs, knowledge is power—and ignorance is a slow bleed across your own bathroom floor. If I had known about the Dremel beforehand, it would have been worth every penny.

  • It Took a Village to Buy My Watch

    It Took a Village to Buy My Watch

    Last night I dreamt I was presiding over a vast communal effort devoted to a project of enormous importance—though no one, least of all me, could say what the project actually was. It had the gravity of a cathedral build or a moon launch, but the specifics were conspicuously absent. People just knew it mattered. My daughter’s childhood therapist, Olivia, was there, radiating purpose. She had invested a great deal of money into the endeavor, and I could hear others murmuring that I ought to reimburse her, which struck me as both reasonable and vaguely ominous.

    The house filled with people. Then it overflowed. There was so much movement, discussion, and civic enthusiasm that I slipped out, went to the gym, exercised—as one does in dreams when overwhelmed by responsibility—and returned to find the situation had escalated. Now there were dozens of neighbors on the lawn, standing around with the earnest posture of volunteers waiting to be assigned meaning. The sheer body heat inside the house had become an issue, so an air-conditioning repairman was summoned, as if climate control were now a municipal concern.

    I stood on the front lawn waiting for the repairman when Olivia emerged from the house and calmly announced that the project was complete. No speeches. No ribbon-cutting. Just resolution. She approached me holding a velvet pillow, and on it rested a three-thousand-dollar Seiko MM300 diver—white dial, blue markings, mounted on a sumptuous bracelet. I accepted it, stunned. I had believed myself to be in a strap-only phase, a man past bracelets, past flash. But there it was, on my wrist, and I knew instantly that this was the watch. The Holy Grail. Bracelet and all.

    The joy was real—but so was the shame. It dawned on me that I had apparently mobilized an entire community, generated heat waves, summoned tradesmen, and absorbed financial investment…all to solve a problem that was, at its core, exquisitely trivial. A watch. Beautiful, yes. All-consuming, certainly. But narcissistic? Undeniably. I woke with the uneasy recognition that even my unconscious mind knows how absurdly far I’m willing to go in pursuit of the right object—and how many people I’m prepared to inconvenience along the way.

  • How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

    How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

    I was in sixth grade when I made the worst procrastination decision of my young life: I watched Night of the Living Dead instead of doing the dishes.

    I didn’t even want to watch it. My parents were out for the evening and issued a single, modest commandment: Do whatever you want—just do the dishes. The sink was stacked with plates, bowls, pots, and pans, a greasy jungle daring me to enter. I took one look and decided I deserved a short rest before battle. I collapsed into a yellow bean bag chair, turned on the TV, and landed on Creature Features, which was broadcasting one of the most psychologically devastating films ever made.

    I’d heard about the movie at school. Kids spoke of it in hushed, reverent tones, as if surviving it were a rite of passage. Fear, apparently, was proof of greatness. How bad could it really be? I told myself this while enjoying the immediate relief of not scrubbing forks. Then the movie started: a brother and sister visiting a grave. The atmosphere curdled instantly. Something was wrong. I should have changed the channel. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Fear and curiosity locked arms and dragged me forward.

    Minutes turned into hours. I watched bodies fall apart, social order dissolve, and hope get eaten alive. The gore wasn’t just gross—it was existential. By the time the credits rolled, something essential in me had been misplaced. Innocence, for starters.

    It was nearly midnight. My parents still weren’t home. I wandered into the kitchen and stared at the sink, now radiating menace of a different kind. I was in no psychological condition to clean anything. Zombies had ruined that option. I retreated to my room, crawled into bed, and slept with the covers pulled over my head like a man hiding from the apocalypse.

    Morning arrived with consequences. My parents were furious. The dishes remained undone. I tried to explain that I had endured profound trauma at the hands of George A. Romero, but this defense carried no legal weight. I had failed on all fronts: my psyche was scarred, my parents were enraged, and the dishes were still filthy.

    That night taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Procrastination lies. It promises comfort and ease but delivers a punishment far worse than the task you avoided. I could have spent thirty dull minutes cleaning plates. Instead, I spent the night traumatized by the collapse of civilization and woke up grounded. Avoiding the dishes cost me about a hundred times more than doing them ever would have.

  • How I Tried to Shrink Time to Survive

    How I Tried to Shrink Time to Survive

    In mid-December of 1967, when I was six years old, my mother had a severe bipolar episode, attempted to take her own life, and was hospitalized for a year. My brother was eighteen months old. My father was overwhelmed. The decision was made that I would live with my grandparents in Long Beach while my mother disappeared behind hospital walls and locked doors.

    I was enrolled in a new elementary school where I had no friends and made no effort to find any. I was distant and guarded, already practiced in withdrawal. I was preoccupied with my mother’s absence and with the unanswered question that haunted me daily: what version of her, if any, would come back. My grandparents were loving, steady, and kind, but Long Beach felt foreign and provisional, like a place you wait in, not a place you live. All I talked about was going home to San Jose.

    One afternoon, my grandmother tried to help me endure the waiting. She gave me a calendar and a red pen. She told me I would be going home on June 15, 1968. “Every day,” she said, “you can circle the date, and you’ll know you’re one day closer.” I flipped through the pages and felt something tighten in my chest. The calendar reminded me of movies where prisoners lie on cots in damp cells, carving days into stone, counting time as if it were a sentence rather than a passage.

    After about a week of dutiful circling, patience failed me. I circled every remaining day at once, all the way to June 15, as if the red pen were not just a marker but a lever, something that could force time to lurch forward. When my grandmother saw what I had done, she didn’t scold me. She smiled, but there was sadness in it. “You thought the pen could move time itself,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

    That instinct—to accelerate the calendar, to force arrival—never left me. It hardened into a temperament. When I feel overwhelmed, I reach for control. I measure, schedule, ritualize. I distrust spontaneity. I cling to routines and clocks and daily structures as if they were railings on a narrow bridge. In many ways, I am still that six-year-old boy, circling days, believing that orderly time might tame a chaotic universe and keep me from falling apart.

    The cost of this way of living is distance from life itself. I’m reminded of Ariel Leve’s memoir An Abbreviated Life, which I’ve read twice. Leve describes growing up with a psychologically volatile mother and coping by shrinking the world—by narrowing experience, limiting exposure, contracting life until it feels survivable. That’s what I was doing with the calendar. I wasn’t counting days so much as trying to reduce terror to something measurable.

    I think I’ll listen to Leve’s book again, this time on Audible. Some stories need to be revisited, not because they change, but because you finally recognize yourself inside them.

  • Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    “Always be closing,” Alec Baldwin snarls in Glengarry Glen Ross, playing Blake, a blustering emissary of pure cortisol sent to terrify a roomful of salesmen into obedience. Closing, he tells them, is the only thing that matters. Not effort. Not integrity. Not sanity. Close or die. The line is famous because it taps into something already rotting inside us. We don’t just want to close deals; we want to close life. Getting married is a close. Deciding on a religion is a close. Graduating college is a close. Buying a house, buying a car, settling on a diet, hitting a goal weight—each one dangles the same promise: after this, I can rest. After this, I’ll be done.

    The culture worships closers. Closers are decisive. Closers have plans. Closers stride forward with laminated confidence. Closers collect ceremonies, milestones, certificates, and Instagram captions. Closing is marketed as maturity itself—the moment when uncertainty is evicted and order takes possession of the premises. Winners close. Losers waffle. That’s the myth.

    But closing is a con, and a lazy one at that. It sells the toddler fantasy of permanent comfort: arrive somewhere and stay arrived. Life, unfortunately, does not honor this contract. It leaks, mutates, backslides, and doubles back. I once knew a couple who were desperate to permanently break up with each other. So they got married as a strategy for divorce. They believed the divorce would provide closure—clean lines, sealed chapters, emotional foreclosure. Instead, they remarried. Then divorced again. Then they remarried. Then got another divorce. Closure didn’t show up. It never does. The story simply kept going, indifferent to their paperwork.

    The same lie infects consumer life. I know a man who believed salvation came in the shape of a Rolex Explorer. Ten thousand dollars later, he congratulated himself on having found his Exit Watch—the final piece, the closing bell. Within months, he was browsing watches that made the Rolex look like an appetizer. The watch didn’t close anything. It became a monument to the futility of the attempt.

    We love the idea of closing because we are exhausted—by the volatility of the world and the chaos inside our own skulls. “Always be closing” offers a fantasy of stillness, a promise that motion can end and anxiety can be put in storage. But it’s just another pressure pitch, no more real than the sales patter Mamet skewered. Life doesn’t close. It revises, reopens, and keeps charging interest. The only thing that truly closes is the sales pitch itself.