Cinemorphosis

Tag: family

  • Confessions of a Recovering Hot Take Addict

    Confessions of a Recovering Hot Take Addict

    I remember being enamored with the hot take about a decade ago. To post something brief and witty in a spontaneous, explosive response to a news event and create the verbal equivalent of a basketball dunk seemed powerful and elevating, especially in a world that was becoming increasingly chaotic and unrecognizable. Showing rapier wit online could turn a frumpy guy sitting at his mechanical keyboard into the verbal equivalent of prime-time Michael Jordan.

    That wouldn’t be me, though. My ability to deliver hot takes is probably slightly above average. I may be too long-winded or too slow to process things. Whatever the case, I’m no hot take champion. But I sure envied the hot take mavens. For a while, I thought excelling in that realm was a ticket to success and self-worth.

    Over time, however, I came to see the compulsion to deliver hot takes as a sort of disease, the result of Internet Brain Poisoning, a condition in which the brain is short-circuited by a paradox: It’s getting too much dopamine and starving for dopamine at the same time. This paradox results in less thinking and more reptilian outrage, which in turn compounds the poisoning.

    I could see the poisoning all around me. So could Sam Harris. He had to get off Twitter. It was too toxic and time-consuming. I heeded his lesson. I also contemplated my own disenchantment with hot takes, so I deleted my Twitter-X account a couple of years ago. I still have a Threads account, but I don’t post on it. When I see people trying to deliver hot takes, I cringe at the memories of Internet Brain Poisoning.

    It turns out that trying to find self-worth and belonging through parasocial relationships is a false path that leaves you starving for genuine human connection. You end up lonely and poisoned by the Internet’s false promises and intermittent dopamine surges.

    I’m not completely free from such poisoning. On Instagram, I still post photographs of watches, mostly G-Shocks, and sometimes tell a brief story about something I find meaningful or funny. But I don’t deliver hot takes or hunger for attention the way I used to. My relationship with social media, a branch of behavior modification I prefer to call dopamine farms, has changed, probably for the better.

    If spending time on dopamine farms is the equivalent of bingeing on a banana split, I’ve cut down to one banana split a week instead of eating ten a day. I guess learning to stop grazing on the dopamine farms all day and night is a form of small progress. Recognizing what these dopamine farms do to us may be the first step toward freedom.

    Dopamine farms began imprisoning us and poisoning our brains around 2010, roughly when smartphones made these platforms more accessible and addictive. Sixteen years later, our democratic norms seem to be deteriorating. As Sacha Baron Cohen recently told Scott Galloway on the Pivot podcast, it’s doubtful these dopamine farms can coexist with democracy.

    It turns out that immersion in short-form videos and weaponized misinformation can make us angry, paranoid, and increasingly unable to inhabit a shared epistemic world in which we can agree on basic facts and cooperate for the betterment of our species.

    During this period, as shared reality and democratic norms gave way to cultural and political polarization, I started listening to podcasts by thoughtful people who critiqued the excesses of that polarization. I’ll mention three: Blocked & Reported, featuring Katie Herzog and Jesse Singal; Uncomfortable Conversations, featuring Josh Szeps; and The Unspeakeasy, featuring Meghan Daum.

    These podcasters are excellent thinkers who have done a great job dissecting the tribalism and groupthink of our time. However, I wonder what they’ll be doing as society moves forward and perhaps tires of hearing about cultural and political polarization.

    To their credit, they do much more than deliver hot takes about the current moment. They offer long-form analysis and interviews, and their independent thinking is welcome. However, they often interrogate cultural excesses so ridiculous that at times it seems they’re shooting dead fish in a barrel.

    Groupthink and Internet Brain Poisoning bring out the worst in people and turn them into caricatures. These podcasters have plenty of caricatures to poke fun at and criticize, but I suspect they’re growing tired of the exercise. I suspect they want to move on to something else.

    These three podcasts have given me comfort over the last five years, but I sense a sea change. I suspect they’ll either change direction or eventually cease to exist. When it comes to dopamine farms, Internet Brain Poisoning, and groupthink, I suspect I’m not alone in my disenchantment. There may be a mass exodus from these platforms, although I know the learning curve can be slow.

    This exodus may take time. The sooner the better.

  • The Day I Refused to Laugh

    The Day I Refused to Laugh

    I suspect that had Augustine grown up in Manchester in the 1980s, he would have been a diehard fan of The Smiths. Many of the band’s songs, driven by Morrissey’s forlorn persona, explore feelings of alienation, melancholy, and longing. The narrator of “The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore” sees the world as a forsaken place where estrangement from its relentless barbarism seems inevitable. The narrator of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out” is broken and restless, aching to find some ultimate source of peace. “The Boy With the Thorn in His Side” expresses the raw pain of feeling like an incurable misfit.

    Augustine as a misfit is a powerful theme in Catherine Conybeare’s biography Augustine the African. Conybeare emphasizes that Augustine was African, not Roman in the sense of being a native Italian. He spoke Latin, but he could not hide his accent. He was insecure about his heritage and wrote and thought as an outsider in the Christian world. He never felt at home in Italy, where he spent five years of his life. Most of his life was spent in what is now Algeria and Tunisia. Feeling out of place in a world dominated by Rome had a powerful influence on how he approached his faith and argued with others.

    In modern parlance, we might say Augustine had a chip on his shoulder. Feeling embattled can make us surly and unpleasant, but it can also give us an advantage: We never get too comfortable in the tribe. We never become complacent, drinking the same Kool-Aid as everyone else inside the same silo. We may share some beliefs with these people, but we remain inclined to push back against their conventions.

    In some cases, our perennial identity as the misfit may sharpen our critical thinking skills. We benefit from what might be called Outsider Consciousness: a heightened awareness of society’s assumptions, contradictions, and unwritten rules that develops from living within a culture without feeling fully accepted by it. Belonging can make us feel cozy, but that comfort sometimes comes at the price of conformity and complacency. Estrangement, on the other hand, keeps us uncomfortable enough that our default setting becomes one of scrutiny.

    Feeling like an outsider reminds me of 1973, when I returned to California from Nairobi, Kenya, and attended Earl Warren Junior High. The drinking and pot smoking at Earl Warren were a sharp contrast to my life at Nairobi International School, where I had played with the British version of G.I. Joe dolls, called Action Man.

    One afternoon, four boys approached me, and their leader, Kent Daniels, said he wanted to share a joke. He proceeded to tell a long, tedious story that made no sense, after which he and his friends laughed heartily. I stood there and said, “I don’t get it. It’s not funny to me.”

    Kent patted me on the back and said, “You passed the test. We wanted to see if you’d laugh just to go along with the group. We wanted to make sure you weren’t a chump.”

    By refusing to laugh at something I didn’t find funny, I had established credibility. I was accepted by the group precisely because I hadn’t tried too hard to please them. Kent and his friends were smart. They didn’t want just anyone in their fold. A person had to be intelligent, adhere to an honor code, and perhaps bring something of value through his Outsider Consciousness.

    To this day, I remain fascinated that Kent and his friends had devised a way of testing another person’s authenticity. That I passed their test remains a badge of pride. I suppose Morrissey would have appreciated the occasion, though he might have found something more tragic in it than I did. After all, I was simply a twelve-year-old boy who refused to laugh at a joke that wasn’t funny. Never was. Never would be.

  • The Consumer Shangri-La

    The Consumer Shangri-La

    Much to my chagrin and consternation, I have been on a quest for the Consumer Shangri-La, a tiny world in which I surround myself with products that are not only the best in their category but somehow elevate me to a state of transcendence. I’ve become obsessed with coffee rankings involving the seven brands of dark roast sitting on my kitchen counter; fortified soy milk and the way it symbolizes virtue and health in Trader Joe’s recyclable, Edenic green-and-white carton; Greek yogurt and kefir with their magical, life-renewing probiotic properties; oatmeal and buckwheat groats mixed with hemp seeds, promising fiber and a nutritional bonanza; creatine with its supposed power to ward off depression and grant me eternal youth; my half dozen solar Multiband 6 G-Shocks and the comfort of reliable atomic time; my stable of Brooks Ghost Max walking shoes, which make me feel as though I’m floating on clouds while commiserating with the gods; and padded noise-canceling headphones that transport me into the paradise of Baroque oboe concertos, soothing the savage beast inside me.

    All of this is nonsense, of course. To my credit, I’m trying to break free from my consumer obsessions and make room in my brain for heavier intellectual pursuits, such as tackling the newest biography of Augustine, an irascible chap with little tolerance for anyone who deviated from his orthodoxy. I’m also two-thirds finished with my book, but for the last forty-eight hours, I’ve had difficulty writing. I wrote a chapter for my book and a blog post two days ago, but since then, my consumer obsessions have gotten the better of me.

    The good news is that I haven’t been spending time on social media, a hellish place I refer to as the dopamine farms. Unfortunately, abandoning those farms has not diminished my consumer obsessions, as I had hoped. I suspect these preoccupations are distracting me from the emotional challenges of turning sixty-five two days ago and watching so many friends develop cancer and other serious ailments. I wonder whether these late-life chapters generate an anxiety that compels me to retreat into a consumer bubble.

    This retreat may be explained by something that afflicts many of us as we grow older: Terror Management Theory. As the reality of our inevitable death becomes more immediate, we seek refuge in systems that promise certainty, permanence, and protection against the chaos of existence. By elevating our beliefs, values, and possessions into seemingly unquestionable sources of security, we construct psychological bulwarks against the terrifying realization that our bodies will deteriorate, our lives will end, and much of what we cherish lies beyond our control.

    I’m sixty-five, and more and more of my friends are developing serious illnesses or passing to the other side. Yet there I was this morning, standing at my kitchen counter, listening to my Ninja coffee maker make its final gurgling sounds before beeping to announce that my dark roast was ready. I poured it into my giant cream-colored mug, added a generous splash of fortified organic soy milk, and contemplated whether I had finally found the perfect coffee. I knew, of course, that none of these products could protect me from the indignities of aging or the certainty of death. But for the next fifteen minutes, I had a perfect cup of coffee, and that seemed to be enough.

  • I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    I Can’t Remember If I’m Losing My Mind

    If you’re in your sixties, you may be terrified by your cognitive decline because you don’t know the difference between normal aging, mild cognitive impairment, and dementia. You’re eager to make exercise and dietary choices that might slow the decline. You may even consider medication if that’s the best route. More than anything, you want to be informed rather than left in the dark.

    My concerns about memory loss began in my late fifties when I noticed that if I didn’t play one of my piano compositions every couple of weeks, I would forget parts of it. Around sixty-four, I noticed more forgetfulness. I would share a story with my wife and then repeat it several hours later until she interrupted me to explain that she’d already heard it. In my college classes, I might tell an anecdote in the third week and repeat it in the tenth, only to hear students laughing and pointing out my redundancy. Once I left the burner on low after making pasta sauce, and another time I left my work keys in the door at work. In both cases, I was multitasking. Doing several things at once has become more of a liability than ever.

    Like many people in my age bracket, I became fearful. I didn’t know what constituted normal cognitive aging and what might point to something more serious.

    I needed a guide, so I did some research and came upon Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory: What’s Normal, What’s Not, and What to Do About It, by neurologist Andrew Budson and neuropsychologist Maureen O’Connor. They begin with Step 1, an explanation of normal and abnormal memory loss. They write “that the difference between normal and abnormal memory isn’t necessarily the type of problems that occur but rather the frequency and severity of those problems.”

    They describe memories as episodes: having a meal, completing a workout, going to a movie, and so on. These episodes create coherent stories full of sensory details. No one has perfect memory or recall, so let go of that myth. There are many reasons we fail to remember things. If you’re not paying attention to your surroundings but are going through the motions on autopilot, or you’re distracted, you’re less likely to remember what happened.

    The authors observe that anxiety and depression can interfere with memory. So if you’re a self-absorbed depressive who spends too much time living inside his own head, you may not be particularly attentive to the external world.

    As I read Seven Steps to Managing Your Aging Memory, I see an ongoing theme: You need to train yourself to pay attention. As the frontal lobes age, certain aspects of attention and executive function can become less efficient. The result may resemble some symptoms of ADHD. I was never diagnosed with ADHD, but I’m convinced I’ve had some of its traits all my life. If that’s the case, my aging frontal lobes have given me a new layer of ADHD-like symptoms over an already existing layer.

    The authors discuss strategies for improving attention, including the use of stimulants such as coffee. I drink my morning coffee religiously. My attention is at its best in the morning, when I do my best reading and writing.

    At the end of Chapter Two, titled “How Does Memory Change in Normal Aging?,” the authors explain that spending over an hour trying to find your car in a parking lot is not normal. This made me wonder whether I’ve been cognitively impaired all my life. Like my maternal grandmother, I have a horrible sense of direction. In 1980, during my sophomore year in college, it took me nearly half an hour to find my car. For the last decade or so, whenever I park in a giant garage, I photograph the identifying numbers so I can find my car later.

    My wife has known me for nearly thirty years. Throughout that time, she has observed that I live too much inside my head. We’ve all heard the cliché of the absent-minded professor. I’ve lived up to that cliché since I was in my thirties. I’ve shown up to class wearing slacks with tags and vertical strips of tape still affixed to them or wearing my shirt inside-out, only to be made aware of these sartorial violations by my attentive students. Old age may simply make the absent-mindedness more pronounced. In more serious cases, however, memory and navigation problems can point to Alzheimer’s disease. Warning signs include getting lost while driving and being unable to use familiar visual cues to find your way back, regularly forgetting appointments, repeatedly losing things, and asking the same questions or telling the same stories without remembering having done so. Such patterns can reflect the rapid forgetting associated with Alzheimer’s disease.


    I do repeat myself. For two consecutive weeks, I forgot that Thursday evening was when I was supposed to take one of my daughters to see her therapist. I also left a stovetop burner on, although that happened only once. So I’m not sure where I stand.

    I called my doctor to arrange a phone consultation and a cognitive assessment.

    One screening questionnaire discussed in the book is the AD8. Answering yes to two or more questions can indicate possible cognitive impairment that warrants further evaluation. It does not, by itself, establish Alzheimer’s disease or any other brain disorder.

    I answered yes to exactly two questions. Number 3 states: “Repeats the same things over and over (questions, stories, or statements).” I repeat myself, but usually only once. Does that count as a yes? Then there’s Number 7: “Trouble remembering appointments.” I forgot my daughter’s therapy appointment twice in a row and was so mortified that I doubt I’ll forget again. Does that count?

    Ambiguity is not helpful here, but the authors make a statement about dementia that is not ambiguous. They write that “Dementia indicates impairment of daily function due to problems with thinking and memory.”

    So the question is this: Is my daily functioning impaired? And that leads to a second question: How severe does the impairment have to be before it crosses the threshold into dementia?

    I suspect the next chapter of my life will involve exploring that second question more rigorously through cognitive testing, medical consultation, and lifestyle changes designed to protect my memory.

    I need to find out whether I have something called subjective cognitive decline, a condition in which people perceive a deterioration in their cognitive abilities even though standardized testing may show normal performance. I know I’m not the same person I used to be. I feel compromised, and I worry that this compromise may point to greater memory loss later in life.

    Or perhaps I have mild cognitive impairment, in which measurable cognitive difficulties don’t substantially interfere with independent daily functioning. Some people with this condition develop dementia, while others remain stable or even improve. The risk depends on the underlying cause, so I can’t assume that I face a fifty-fifty chance of developing dementia.

    Dementia is a general term for cognitive decline severe enough to interfere with independent functioning. It isn’t synonymous with Alzheimer’s disease, which is one possible cause. The authors define Alzheimer’s more specifically, writing that “Alzheimer’s is a brain disease characterized by amyloid plaques and neurofibrillary tangles.” The disease often affects memory-related structures, including the hippocampus, before progressing through other regions of the brain.

    Regular aerobic exercise, a healthy diet, and an active social life are among the habits associated with better cognitive health and a lower risk of dementia. Addicted to exercise and partial to a Mediterranean-style diet, I do reasonably well in the physical health department, although I could stand to lose thirty pounds.

    But the social component is more disturbing. Antisocial, introverted, and depressive, I’ve failed considerably in the social health category.

    My wife began worrying about my lack of a social life a few years ago. She was also the first to express concern about my memory loss. So I got off my butt, started doing some research, called my doctor for an appointment, and decided to become proactive about my cognitive health.

    I know a retired martial arts instructor who used to be an officemate at the college. I need to reach out to him and see whether he’ll join me for an hour-long walk at the beach every week. That kind of social routine could be a first step.

    I’m not hopeless. I didn’t dismiss my wife’s concerns. I took them seriously and responded appropriately. I just hope I haven’t done too little too late. If I do have a serious form of memory loss, my goal, as the authors advise, is to manage it so that it doesn’t take over my life.

    One thing is clear. Memory loss can lead to anxiety and depression, and anxiety and depression can produce cognitive symptoms that resemble dementia. So I may be dealing with a recursive loop, one condition feeding the other in a vicious cycle of what has sometimes been called “pseudodementia.”

    One thing I know that fights depression and learned helplessness is knowledge.

    I must continue the deep dive.

  • The United States of Memory Foam

    The United States of Memory Foam

    Last night I dreamed I was working out with kettlebells in my garage. Overcome by a sudden restlessness, I decided to venture away from home by doing a long Farmer’s Walk, an exercise in which you hold a heavy kettlebell in each hand and walk a significant distance as if carrying two suitcases. I decided to take a walk across the entire country.

    As I journeyed through America, I discovered that everyone was an aspiring influencer. The product everyone was advertising on social media was mattresses, the kind that arrive at your doorstep compressed into a box and then inflate before your eyes. Everywhere I went, people were pretending to sleep, wearing fake, blissful smiles while recording video selfies. Living rooms, bedrooms, and other areas of the house had been transformed into home studios. People were so absorbed in their influencer activities that they no longer spoke to one another. Conversation had died. People lived alongside one another but were psychologically worlds apart.

    I decided to walk a considerable distance to Influencer City, where a woman who presided over all the influencers lived at a luxurious resort. She was known as the Influencer Queen. When I arrived, she was having tea and biscuits with her associates beside a swimming pool.

    They regarded me with some curiosity, a man in his sixties carrying two kettlebells. I could see the Queen’s concern, so I assured her that the kettlebells weren’t weighing me down. Something else was crushing me, I explained. I was discouraged by the fragmentation of society. Everyone had devoted themselves to the futile mission of selling dubious mattresses.

    Surrounded by her entourage, the Influencer Queen listened intently, as though my words had affected her deeply. But just as I was reaching the heart of my criticism, someone whispered in her ear that the swimming pool needed renovations, and she immediately lost interest. She turned to her entourage and began discussing the renovations as though I were no longer standing there.

    Realizing that she had no interest in my concerns, I walked away. Forlorn, I tried to make my way home, but I had no idea where I was. I spotted a neighborhood in the distant sunset and decided to try my luck in that direction. The kettlebells remained surprisingly light, but my heart was heavy. In the distance, I heard an aspiring influencer discussing coil count and gel-infused memory foam.

    I sighed in despair. Americans knew everything about memory foam but had forgotten how to talk to one another.

  • The Cringe That Defines You

    The Cringe That Defines You

    Cringe television refers to those comedies that bypass sentimentality altogether and go straight for the jugular by creating socially awkward situations–the equivalent of a social car crash–that are almost unbearable to watch. You squirm, gasp, cover your eyes, tell yourself you can’t believe what’s happening, and insist that you need to watch something less distressing. Yet you remain glued to the television, watching in spite of yourself. The Larry Sanders Show, the British and American versions of The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and You’re the Worst mercilessly floor the pedal, taking you to the golden nougat of cringe, that horrific center where fallen social graces, eviscerated decorum, spectacular embarrassment, and irrevocable humiliation achieve a ripeness and potency you never dreamed possible.

    We watch cringe television for complex reasons. There is the perverse enjoyment of it, which almost defies psychological analysis, except to acknowledge that we harbor a streak of cruelty that enjoys watching others lose their dignity. But there is also the survivor inside us who wants to learn from these humiliating spectacles so that we won’t follow in these hapless people’s footsteps and suffer their ostracism and disgrace.

    One lesson we learn from cringe television is that the more swollen our egos become, the more stupid and socially unaware we are likely to be. The more aggressively we assert our egotism in social situations, the more we alienate others, often without the slightest awareness that we’re being perceived as pompous, overbearing, bullying, obnoxious, and just plain boring.

    Offering an abundance of cringe is the reality show Below Deck in all its variations. My wife and I were recently watching the Down Under version when chef Ben Robinson decided he deserved to sleep in the more spacious guest quarters for one night to catch up on his sleep. The chief stew explicitly told him not to do so because the bed had been made with clean linens for guests arriving the next day. But Ben, having an inglorious hissy fit, marched into the luxurious guest quarters, messed up the bed, and refused to leave, even after his co-worker, second officer João Franco, urged him to get out.

    Ben Robinson is a talented, intelligent, well-read, articulate chef, but thanks to cringe television, those are not the qualities I will remember. I will remember a broken forty-five-year-old man selfishly violating every rule of decorum so he could indulge himself in the forbidden guest quarters. That episode taught me a painful lesson: A single moment of cringe can be so potent that it obliterates your finer qualities and reduces you to your lowest common denominator in the eyes of others. Whatever Ben does with the rest of his life, I will always see him throwing an infantile tantrum in the guest quarters, clinging to the sheets while João begs him to leave for the chief stew’s sake.

    Regardless of how generous I want to be toward Ben, I cannot erase the image of him behaving like a five-year-old. This is an example of the Reverse-Halo Effect, also known as the Horn Effect, in which one conspicuous negative action contaminates our overall judgment of a person, regardless of that person’s other admirable qualities.

    We all fear becoming victims of the Reverse-Halo Effect. Perhaps that’s one reason we watch cringe television: We hope to immunize ourselves against a similar fate.

    Because my own ego has gotten the better of me on more occasions than I care to count, I’m sure I’ve suffered from the Reverse-Halo Effect myself. I’m therefore in no position to judge Ben Robinson. Like him, I’ve dished up more cringe than is healthy for a lifetime.

    One potential source of cringe I’ve been imagining lately involves telling my co-workers that I’m retiring within a year and then changing my mind. The cat is already out of the bag. Everyone in my department knows I’m retiring. On several occasions, I’ve told colleagues that I’m hanging it up, only to have them interrupt me with, “I know. The word is out.” They’ve been treating me with the warmth and kindness people instinctively extend to someone approaching retirement. It’s a sentimental occasion, after all—the twilight of a career, a time for reflection and appreciation of the good years.

    But after twenty years of watching cringe television, I found myself entertaining a perverse thought: What if I changed my mind? What if, after announcing my retirement to everyone, perhaps even enjoying a retirement party, I decided I wasn’t ready to make the leap? I needed the money. I needed the work routine. I needed human interaction. I needed to be needed. God, how awkward it would be to show up at the fall department meeting the following year when everyone thought I was gone. I could imagine being about as welcome as a bride who wakes up on her wedding day with a boil in the center of her forehead.

    The good news is that I have no doubts about retiring. I will not show up like an unwanted boil next fall. I will be retired. But years of watching cringe television have instilled in me the crazed desire to imagine scenarios that would put me in socially awkward situations. This is surely a terrible use of my time. I would be better off concentrating on avoiding the very real moments of cringe that my egotism produces naturally, without distracting myself with imaginary disasters.

    Ben Robinson, I’m disappointed in you for selfishly messing up those bed sheets, but I can’t judge you. I’ve metaphorically shit the bed too many times in my life to count.

  • The Nut Beneath the Sink

    The Nut Beneath the Sink

    Our kitchen sink features what is called a brushed stainless-steel U-spout faucet centered over a steel basin. It has a single handle that adjusts the water temperature: down for cold and up for hot. Three and a half years ago, the faucet base came loose, so you had to hold the faucet with one hand and operate the handle with the other to keep the entire assembly from rotating round and round. I bought a RIDGID telescoping basin wrench with a built-in LED light. As I recall, my wife, who is more of an engineer than I am, got under the sink and tightened the nut.

    A few days ago, the base loosened again. My wife, who is recovering from surgery, said I’d have to do it. I went into the garage, retrieved the telescoping basin wrench, and showed it to her.

    “Do you remember how you used this?” I asked.

    She looked at the device as if I had handed her the blueprints for a NASA space mission.

    “I don’t even remember if I used that,” she said. “I might have tightened it another way.”

    So I went on YouTube and watched demonstration videos. The device did not look user-friendly. One reviewer, a plumber, said it was kind of weird.

    I thought I’d give it a try.

    I first cleared everything from under the kitchen sink: liquid dishwasher detergent, dishwashing soap, kitchen cleansers, water filters, a mini-sized fire extinguisher, sponges, brushes, mineral oil, and other supplies that had accumulated over time. I put everything into several canvas Trader Joe’s shopping bags and placed a towel on the bottom of the empty cabinet.

    Even emptied, the cabinet was difficult to maneuver in because of the garbage disposal and the under-sink water-filtration unit. Through trial and error, I learned that I could get farthest underneath by leaning on my left shoulder and angling my body in from the left. I held my phone camera inside the cavernous crevice and took a photograph of what I was aiming for.

    The photo, taken from inside the cabinet looking upward toward the underside of the sink and countertop, showed three prominent assemblies crowded into a tight space. On the left was a dark circular component with a black hose. Near the center were braided metal water-supply lines and additional plumbing. To the right was the important part: a shiny, horseshoe-shaped metal mounting bracket pressed against the underside of the countertop, with a copper-colored threaded shaft and fastener extending downward from the faucet. Another black hose hung through the area, making the mounting hardware even harder to see and reach. The photograph made clear why the repair was so awkward: the faucet fastener was tucked high against the countertop amid hoses and plumbing, with almost no room to maneuver a wrench.

    At about six feet and more than 230 pounds, I had limited mobility beneath the sink. Add my claustrophobia, which made me want to bolt out of the cabinet as quickly as possible, and I decided it was time to call my engineering friend Pedro.

    I’ve known Pedro for more than sixteen years. He is much shorter than I am and about a hundred pounds lighter. He was coming over anyway to take a couple of computers I no longer used. He planned to give them to his sister, also an engineer, who had some use for them.

    Unlike me, Pedro was able to make sense of the YouTube demonstration videos. He understood how to position the spring-loaded jaws around the mounting nut and flip the wrench head so the jaws would grip when turned in the tightening direction. As I held the faucet base steady from above, he tightened the nut from below.

    He then thanked me for giving him the opportunity to learn how to use a basin wrench. As the landlord of a couple of properties, he explained that he might someday need to perform the same repair for his tenants.

    But neither of us was convinced that this $70 wrench was the best way to go. RIDGID also makes a much cheaper tool, the $30 EZ Change plumbing wrench. Rather than using a spring-loaded jaw, it uses interchangeable sockets. You have to select the correct fitting, which may require some trial and error, but I’d rather deal with a socket than that jaw. Pedro felt the same way.

    After the faucet crisis was over, Pedro and I spent an hour talking about the rivalry between Honda and Toyota, the problems with turbo engines, speeding tickets, and his preference for Linux over other operating systems. Eventually, he had to head home. As I carried an old iMac to his car and he carried an old laptop, I told him I’d be sixty-five in a couple of weeks.

    “How old were you when I first met you?” he asked.

    “Forty-seven,” I said. “My wife was pregnant with the twins when you took my writing class.”

    Over those years, I watched Pedro go from state-champion boxer to firefighter to electrical engineer. He is now a landlord of several properties and the proud owner of a Lexus RC 350 F Sport in obsidian black. About a decade ago, my father-in-law recommended Pedro to a friend who hired him at his engineering firm. Because of his work ethic and ability to solve problems on the fly, Pedro quickly became the number-one employee. He is the go-to person for putting out fires and making sure projects meet their deadlines.

    So it didn’t surprise me that what was, for me, an anxiety-laden nightmare involving an inaccessible nut beneath the kitchen sink was, for Pedro, a useful learning experience—a practical skill he could add to his landlord repertoire.

    I am grateful to have Pedro as a friend. But I am also worried. What do I do three years from now when that nut comes loose again? Do I bring out the intimidating basin wrench with its spring-loaded jaw? Or should I buy the cheaper socket version?

    By then, Pedro will probably have invented a device that allows anxious homeowners like me to tighten the nut from above the sink.

  • Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    When I was in my late thirties, I was visiting my wife’s family for a summer barbecue in Long Beach. Her brother and some of his friends were there. We were standing on the front lawn talking about some of my habits and routines: eating dinner no later than five; going to bed no later than ten; eating sufficient fiber; abstaining from alcohol but deriving great pleasure from sipping chilled prune juice, analyzing its complex flavors with the panache of a sommelier; driving to movie theaters an hour early to make sure I get a parking space and a good seat; avoiding long drives because I find them mentally taxing; and buying a car only after scouring the reliability data in Consumer Reports.

    At one point, one of my brother-in-law’s friends, Shane, a tall, Viking-like figure with light blue eyes and shaggy blond hair, casually looked at me and said, “Dude, you’d make a great eighty-five-year-old.”

    I can understand Shane’s comment. I am not a risk-taker. I like predictability and routine. I like reliable outcomes. I am drawn to things that give me assurance and safety.

    Take cars, for example. I am drawn to Honda. I have been buying Hondas for the last four decades. I like the interiors. They are familiar. I know how to use the controls. The ride is smooth. There is no drama. The styling is not too busy. It tends toward vanilla. I even like the word Honda. It sounds angelic, whispery, and soothing. Repeating the word over and over is a form of ASMR.

    My connection to Honda runs so deep that my wife and I both own Honda Accords. Hers is a 2014 with a 2.4-liter naturally aspirated engine, and mine is a 2018 with a 2.0 turbo. When our twins get their driver’s licenses, we plan on buying another Accord, a hybrid that gets around 50 mpg. Or perhaps a Camry Hybrid. Whichever brand is the most reliable when I’m ready to buy. Because I am willing to share my Accord with my daughters, I can hold off on buying my next car. I think I might wait until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By then, Accords and Camrys will probably get over 60 miles per gallon.

    Regardless of what I do, I will be anxious because a big purchase entails risk. I am risk-averse. To minimize risk, I seek monotony, routine, and familiarity. I subscribe to the adage that it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    This does not mean I’m provincial. I’d be just as happy having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast as I would a bowl of Korean bibimbap. I find both dishes comforting. Both are familiar to me. Both are reliably delicious.

    So I’m a bit riled that in the summer of 2000 Shane said I’d make a great eighty-five-year-old. Actually, I would not. I can lift more weight than most men half my age. I love international food, the spicier the better. I watch daring, often subversive television, movies, and documentaries. I am, in other words, youthful and adventurous when it comes to exercise, eating, and entertainment.

    On the other hand, I am admittedly overly cautious and ridiculously obsessive when it comes to maintaining my routine and making big consumer purchases. But I think my contradictions should be appreciated. Labeling me prematurely old is inaccurate and demonstrates weak analytical skills.

    I love Shane. I wish him the best, and I am eager to locate him, if for no other reason than to discuss his appraisal of me as an exemplar of an eighty-five-year-old on my wife’s family’s lawn that summer day in 2000.

    I might even politely challenge him to an arm wrestle.

  • The Nap of No Return

    The Nap of No Return

    As a lifelong sloth and connoisseur of comfort, routine, and having “everything just so,” I have to be wary of infantilization, the habit of soothing myself by disengaging from the world until I enter long stretches of mindless inertia.

    I am not particularly vulnerable to this dangerous habit in the morning. I write, play the piano, and work out with kettlebells in the garage. But after lunch and my fitful post-workout nap, I am drawn to the couch and my true crime shows. That is where I can become lizard-eyed and begin checking out from life.

    Part of my afternoon retreat is owed to my lifelong inability to sleep well. I haven’t gotten eight straight hours of sleep in more than forty years. I wake from disturbing dreams that are all different and all the same. I’m often traveling in a caravan of people. We are walking or driving along the coast, embarked upon some vague quest. The leader, generally speaking, is not happy with me. I am too grumpy. I am moving too slowly or too quickly. I am going down the wrong path.

    Invariably, I get lost and have to find my way back to the group. I am in a state of great distress. The harder I try to rectify the situation, the worse it becomes. Eventually I wake up and try to process another haunting narrative featuring me as the stray sheep. I go to the bathroom, return to the bed or the couch, where I probably migrated around midnight, put in my earbuds, and hope a podcast will lull me back to sleep.

    My nights of tumultuous, broken, tormented sleep point to the fact that I am a restless, anxious person. Letting go and giving myself over to the moment is difficult, not just when sleeping but in other endeavors.

    Reading can be a challenge, especially when I find myself getting irritated because a book seems padded with fluff. It should have been an essay or a short story, but instead it has been inflated into a 300-page monstrosity of repetition and tedium.

    Sitting through a two-hour movie can prove almost impossible. If the movie features a detective wearing a turtleneck sweater in a balmy climate, I experience vicarious heat exhaustion and have to turn off the television or flee the theater before I suffer a nervous breakdown. When characters eat at a dinner table during a TV show or movie, I lose interest in the plot and start wondering what they’re eating. Soon I am getting an apple from the refrigerator.

    I can relax in certain circumstances. I can sit down at the piano for twenty minutes. Piano is a reliable source of anxiety release, especially when I play for an imaginary audience in which I am the hero. There is something wonderfully relaxing about playing a sonata before imaginary admirers who are being lulled into the same state of relaxation by my piano playing that I am.

    Another reliable source of relaxation is the afternoon consumption of television droning in the background while I descend into a blissful half-sleep condition I call the Womb State.

    An African animal documentary narrated by my trusty guide David Attenborough can put me into the Womb State. A true crime series in which detectives are waiting to learn whether ballistic evidence matches the casings used by their suspect can lull me into the Womb State.

    My deepest, most blissful descent into the Womb State in recent memory occurred when I put on my noise-cancelling headphones, opened Netflix on my phone, and listened to The Big Picture podcast. Listening to the gregarious Sean Fennessey and Amanda Dobbins speculate for two hours about which movies might produce the year’s Best Actor was a euphoric state of relaxation more potent than Xanax or Valium.

    As I am only a few weeks from turning sixty-five and know that my sleep will probably become lighter and lighter, I realize I may depend increasingly on these Womb State pastimes. Opening a streaming app on my phone, putting on my noise-cancelling headphones, and listening to animal documentaries, crime shows, and movie-review podcasts may add fifteen years to my life.

    The problem, of course, is overdoing it.

    When I like something, I tend to overdo it, and the relentless pursuit of the Womb State can result in infantilization.

    As someone whose anxious personality denies him a good night’s sleep, I crave the Womb State as a counterbalance. I crave the soothing sounds of a podcast or documentary while giant cushioned headphone cones surround my ears and I lie on a Beautyrest with diamond-infused memory foam and microcontouring pocketed nano-coils while a Tempur-Pedic pillow cradles my neck. In the proper dose, this afternoon ritual gives me the rest I need.

    Taken to extremes, however, the ritual becomes part of the dark arts.

    The nap with headphones is no longer about rejuvenation. It is about extinction.

    Think of the 1973 movie Soylent Green, a dystopian nightmare in which citizens can choose voluntary euthanasia. They listen to soothing music while immersed in wraparound projections of beautiful landscapes. The government controls these citizens in part through the power of infantilization. There is a fine line between wanting to let go and becoming a helpless, malleable citizen whose self-agency has disappeared forever.

    I therefore need to remain wary of the temptations of infantilization. Napping may provide necessary rest for a man who can’t get a good night’s sleep, or it could be the precursor to the Nap of No Return.

    Just as David Attenborough adds extra gravitas and poignancy to his voice while describing an old alpha lion leaving its pride to die in isolated dignity, I can imagine the fabled naturalist shifting his commentary to me:

    “And here lies a man for whom the nap crept up on him and would not let go. Here in the suburbs, the greatest threat is not a natural predator. It is infantilization.”

  • My Accidental COVID Shot

    My Accidental COVID Shot

    It was a sunny morning on the first of October when I sat taking notes in a Kaiser doctor’s office in Carson while my wife and her surgeon reviewed the post-op do’s and don’ts. Nothing over ten pounds for six weeks. No blood-thinning ibuprofen during that time. She could sleep on her side but not her stomach. She could lift her arms over her head. In a week, she would want vitamin E oil for the affected areas. In about a month, silicone scar cream.

    Eventually the conversation drifted from post-op recovery to their shared interest in child-rearing. My wife is a middle-school health and language arts teacher; the doctor has a one-year-old and a three-year-old and is currently serving a life sentence in the maximum-security wing of parenting.

    I grew antsy.

    A week earlier, I had missed my opportunity to get a drive-through flu shot, and at nearly sixty-five I don’t like missing my shots. Vaccinations have become another maintenance item, like rotating the tires or changing the furnace filter. Ignore the schedule long enough and something expensive starts coughing.

    I excused myself, received the blessing of my wife and her doctor, and took the elevator down to Floor One, where I found the vaccine station. I filled out a form, assured everyone that vaccines did not cause me to transform into Mr. Hyde, and sat beside a friendly nurse in her early thirties.

    “You’re okay with Pfizer?” she asked.

    “What are my other choices?”

    “None.”

    “Then don’t offer me Diet Pepsi when there’s only Diet Coke.”

    She laughed.

    The shot burned like hell. It burned even more after the needle came out, but I maintained my dignity, thanked the nurse, and returned to Floor Three, where my wife was waiting in the post-op area.

    I told her about the burning.

    “Did you get a flu shot?” she asked.

    I nodded. Of course I had. I had gone to the flu-shot station she had pointed out earlier.

    “Sounds like you got a COVID shot.”

    “She did say it was Pfizer.”

    “That’s COVID, dude.”

    There are moments when a single sentence rearranges reality.

    We returned to the vaccine station, and sure enough, sitting there in plain sight were two stacks of forms: one for flu and one for COVID.

    I was a car that needed unleaded and had somehow filled itself with diesel.

    Since I was already there—and apparently collecting vaccines like G-Shocks—I decided I might as well get the flu shot too, this time in the opposite arm.

    I rolled up my sleeve.

    “Flex or relax?”

    “Relax,” the nurse said, “or you’ll be sorry.”

    This seemed like excellent advice for vaccines, aging, and perhaps life in general.

    I relaxed.

    I thanked her for both shots and returned to my wife, who reminded me that the last COVID vaccine had turned me into a basket case for about twenty-four hours. This was unfortunate timing. She was recovering from surgery and needed me functioning at something approaching full capacity, not wandering around the house shivering beneath a blanket and announcing that death was imminent.

    I promised that when we got home, I would take three ibuprofen and a nap and prepare myself for whatever punishment my immune system had scheduled for the next twenty-four hours.

    Perhaps I should be grateful. Through a combination of diligence, confusion, and poor signage comprehension, I had knocked out two vaccines in one visit. My shingles vaccinations had been completed six months earlier. Now COVID and flu were checked off the list.

    At nearly sixty-five, you begin to appreciate these small victories. Retirement is approaching, bringing with it enough disruptions, anxieties, medical appointments, identity crises, and mysterious bodily developments without influenza, shingles, or COVID joining the welcoming committee.

    So perhaps I’m ready.

    We shall see.

    Meanwhile, I’m eager to tear off these damn Band-Aids.