Cinemorphosis

Tag: family

  • Crossing the Retirement Rubicon Means You Cannot Go Back

    Crossing the Retirement Rubicon Means You Cannot Go Back

    Once I had done my due diligence and concluded that I was emotionally and financially ready to retire, I began telling people: my wife, my children, friends, family, colleagues. This seemed like a straightforward administrative matter. I had made a decision. Now I was informing the relevant parties.

    I was wrong.

    I had stumbled upon what I call the Performative Retirement Principle: announcing your retirement does not merely describe a future event. It begins the event. The word itself changes your status. Before you say it, you are a person thinking about retirement. You can entertain the idea, examine pension statements, run calculations, meet with financial advisers, and imagine leisurely Tuesday mornings without fundamentally altering your identity. Retirement remains hypothetical, one possibility among many.

    Then you say it.

    Retirement.

    The effect is surprisingly close to Billy Batson screaming “SHAZAM!” One moment he is an ordinary boy; the next, lightning strikes and he occupies a different body. Retirement lacks the cape and thunderbolt, unfortunately, but the metaphysical principle is much the same. You utter the word and undergo a transformation.

    You are no longer merely a professor. You are a professor who is retiring.

    This distinction sounds trivial until you experience it. Once the announcement has been made, retirement begins colonizing your consciousness. Meetings acquire a strange archaeological quality. You sit through discussions of assessment procedures and curriculum revisions with the detached fascination of someone touring the ruins of Pompeii. Colleagues complain about problems that once irritated you, and you realize with a small electrical thrill that many of these problems will soon belong entirely to them.

    Someone starts explaining a new administrative initiative scheduled to roll out three years from now, and you experience the exquisite pleasure of realizing that this particular catastrophe will occur without you.

    The Performative Retirement Principle changes your relationship not only to work but to time. The future, once an enormous warehouse into which you casually tossed plans, begins to acquire walls. You have entered the strange territory of countdowns: last fall semester, last spring semester, last opening-day meeting, last committee assignment, last student who submits a 1,700-word essay consisting largely of AI-generated fog and then looks wounded when you suggest that perhaps he should participate in the writing of it.

    But the transformation is not entirely pleasurable.

    I first uttered the word retirement on August 26, 2026, and almost immediately felt older.

    Nothing had physically changed. My cells had not received an email from Human Resources. My knees did not buckle. My hair did not turn white during lunch. Yet something had shifted. By announcing retirement, I had publicly acknowledged a fact that had previously remained pleasantly abstract: my career had an ending.

    More disturbing, so did everything else.

    That is the hidden power of the word. Retirement appears to be about employment, but underneath it lurks mortality. When you are thirty-five, changing jobs suggests expansion. When you are sixty-five, leaving your career carries a different resonance. Nobody has to say anything. The arithmetic is sitting quietly in the room.

    My world suddenly felt smaller.

    The sensation reminded me of a scene from Battlestar Galactica in which a traitor is sealed behind glass before being expelled through an airlock. She pleads. The others watch. The machinery proceeds with terrible calm. Nobody is screaming. Nobody needs to. The transparent barrier has already divided the universe into two populations: those remaining aboard the ship and the person who is leaving it.

    A ritual exile.

    Aging can feel like that.

    The younger people remain inside the warm spacecraft of seemingly endless tomorrows. They discuss five-year plans, career pivots, promotions, new houses, new babies, new projects. Their futures stretch before them like an interstate disappearing into desert sunlight. You remember inhabiting that world. Indeed, some stubborn portion of your consciousness still believes you belong there.

    Then the glass descends.

    Not because anyone dislikes you. Not because society has declared you useless. The barrier is more unsettling precisely because nobody installed it. Time did.

    You tap the glass.

    Hello? I’m still here.

    And you are. You may be healthy, energetic, curious, productive, perhaps more intellectually alive than you were twenty years earlier. Yet you have glimpsed something the younger travelers cannot fully see because youth requires a certain optical illusion. They know intellectually that life is finite, just as they know Saturn has rings. The information is accurate but emotionally remote.

    Retirement brings the horizon closer.

    For a moment, you may want to take the word back. Perhaps you announced it too soon. Perhaps you should have kept retirement locked inside your head for another six months, privately admiring it like contraband. You might imagine stuffing the genie back into the bottle.

    Too late, my friend.

    You said it.

    The word has entered circulation. Your wife knows. Your children know. Your colleagues know. Your friends know. Somewhere, forms are being completed. Social Security has your name, telephone number, address, and enough numerical information to reconstruct you after a plane crash. The bureaucratic machinery has begun to turn.

    More important, you know.

    That is the irreversible part.

    The Performative Retirement Principle therefore contains both liberation and terror. Saying the word frees you from the illusion that your career must continue indefinitely, but it also strips away another illusion: that time itself is indefinitely renewable.

    You have crossed the Retirement Rubicon.

    There is dignity, however, in refusing to spend the rest of the journey clawing at the glass. The shrinking horizon can clarify as much as it frightens. When time appears limitless, it is easy to squander enormous quantities of it accumulating objects, nursing grievances, winning arguments nobody remembers, and worrying about matters that will eventually seem as consequential as the seating arrangement at a faculty meeting in 1997.

    A finite horizon imposes editorial discipline.

    What stays?

    Family. Friendship. Reading. Writing. Teaching what remains worth teaching. Making things. Helping younger people without pretending they particularly want your wisdom. Paying attention. Remaining curious. Being useful.

    Perhaps that is the final stage of the Performative Retirement Principle. At first, saying “I am retiring” feels like announcing your departure from the world. Gradually, however, you realize that you are departing only from one arrangement of the world.

    The cockpit of youth is sealed. No reentry.

    Fine.

    There are other rooms on the ship.

  • The Acquisition Readiness Principle of Certain Watch Enthusiasts

    The Acquisition Readiness Principle of Certain Watch Enthusiasts

    Six months ago, I bought a G-Shock GW-6900 and quickly convinced myself that it wasn’t for me. I already owned two G-Shocks—the Frogman and the Rescue—and two, I decided, were enough. I had achieved that mythical state every watch collector claims to desire and almost none can tolerate: contentment.

    There was also the 6900 strap. It was just a little too short. Once I buckled the watch around my wrist, I had only two holes remaining. The watch fit perfectly well, but in the fevered jurisprudence of watch collecting, two unused holes constituted evidence for the prosecution.

    So I put the 6900 back in its box, requested a return from Amazon, drove to my local UPS Store, and rid myself of the offending object within ten minutes. I felt enormous relief. Order had been restored. I owned exactly two G-Shocks. The collection was disciplined, coherent, complete.

    Naturally, I then bought three more.

    Over the ensuing months, the Mudman GW-9500 arrived, followed by the Mudman G-9300 and the King GXW-56. My austere two-watch collection had swollen to five, and I happily rotated among them while apparently forgetting the solemn principles of restraint that had compelled me to return the 6900.

    Then, about a month ago, the 6900 began haunting me.

    I started looking at photographs. I read discussions. I watched videos. I studied that strange face with its three circular indicators staring back at me like the instrument panel of a tiny Cold War submarine. Enthusiasts call the GW-6900 “The Three-Eyed Monster,” which is a perfectly good nickname. I prefer my own: the Triclops.

    Soon the Triclops was everywhere. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The watch I had dispatched to UPS with the efficiency of a man returning a defective toaster had somehow acquired an aura in its absence.

    So I bought it again.

    It is now in transit and should arrive in a few days.

    I don’t remember whether the first GW-6900 I owned was the older version with the greenish electroluminescent backlight. I do know that the incoming watch is the newer GW-6900U-1, with its bright white LED. More important, I am strangely confident that this time I am going to connect with it.

    I’ve experienced this phenomenon before: a watch leaves me cold the first time and captivates me later, even though the watch itself has barely changed. Other collectors have experienced it too. It’s tempting to dismiss the whole business as fickleness. We buy something, reject it, romanticize it, and buy it again. From the outside, this resembles the behavior of someone who should have his credit card frozen inside a block of ice.

    But I think something more interesting is going on.

    Collectors like to imagine that our reactions reside entirely in the objects themselves. A watch either speaks to us or it doesn’t. The dimensions are right or wrong. The dial works or it doesn’t. The strap fits or it doesn’t. We behave as if we were laboratory instruments registering objective measurements.

    We’re not.

    Timing matters. Mood matters. The condition of the existing collection matters. Most of all, our willingness to admit another object into that collection matters. Sometimes we encounter the right watch at the wrong time.

    This is what I call the Acquisition Readiness Principle: the psychological state in which a collector becomes genuinely receptive to incorporating a new object into an established collection.

    The first time the GW-6900 arrived, I was defending the sufficiency of my Frogman and Rescue. I wanted a small collection. I was guarding my wrist rotation like a suburban homeowner defending his property line. The 6900 wasn’t merely another watch; it was an intruder. Its slightly short strap gave me the excuse I needed to evict it.

    Six months later, the watch is essentially the same. I am not.

    Now there is a vacancy waiting for the Triclops.

    This raises an obvious question: How can anyone possibly be “not ready” for a wristwatch?

    The question itself exposes the magnificent lunacy of the hobby. We don’t merely buy watches. We audition them. We assign them roles. We decide whether they overlap with existing members of the collection. We worry about whether they will receive enough wrist time. We speak of watches “connecting” with us, as though a 50-millimeter lump of resin containing a quartz module were an emotionally complicated rescue dog.

    A new watch therefore requires a certain receiving mode. We have to lower the drawbridge. We have to stop protecting the existing collection long enough to imagine another member belonging there. The object has not changed. The collector has.

    Does this sound nuts?

    Of course it does.

    The most honest watch enthusiasts have long since abandoned the pretense that this is an entirely rational hobby. But perhaps the watches aren’t making us crazy. We’re doing that perfectly well ourselves. We take harmless little machines designed to tell us the time and burden them with identity, nostalgia, status, memory, personality, tribal affiliation, and elaborate theories of Acquisition Readiness.

    Then we give the hobby a bad name.

    It’s one of the things we’re most proud of.

  • Sovereignty Erosion

    Sovereignty Erosion

    Last night I dreamed I had houseguests when a group of strangers, apparently Russian, simply entered my home. They didn’t knock, sneak in, or offer an explanation. They arrived with the serene entitlement of people checking into an Airbnb for which I had somehow misplaced the reservation.

    Within minutes they had colonized the place. They used the kitchen. They occupied the bathroom. They took showers. One man wandered around completely naked, his body covered with tattoos, apparently having concluded that sufficient quantities of ink constituted clothing.

    I ordered them to leave.

    They regarded this request as mildly inconvenient.

    I had to tell them several times before they finally gathered themselves and departed. Even then, there was no embarrassment, apology, or acknowledgment that commandeering a stranger’s house might represent a minor breach of etiquette. They walked out with the composure of airline passengers who had accidentally taken the wrong seats and moved only after I produced the boarding passes.

    A few hours later, they came back.

    Apparently my eviction had been interpreted not as a permanent revocation of access but as a temporary scheduling conflict. Once again, I had to order them out. Once again, they eventually complied with the weary patience of people humoring an unreasonable homeowner.

    Then another stranger appeared: a woman in her fifties making watch videos in my atrium. She had apparently identified my home as an excellent location for horological content creation. I told her to leave. She ignored me. I told her again. Nothing. By the fifth command, I was yelling. She finally departed reluctantly, as though I were the lunatic disrupting her production schedule.

    At this point, my houseguests told me to call the police.

    I retreated into a dark room and tried to dial the number. But my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I pressed the wrong numbers. I tried again. Wrong again. The simple act of operating a telephone had become an advanced neurological procedure. I knew exactly what I needed to do, yet the message from my brain seemed to lose voltage somewhere on its journey to my hands.

    My body felt like an electric car limping along with one percent battery: the machinery intact, the destination known, the accelerator pressed, but almost no current left to move the thing.

    Then my hands stopped working altogether.

    That was when irritation gave way to helplessness and finally despair. The strangers were almost beside the point. The true nightmare was discovering that ownership itself had become meaningless. The house was mine. The doors were mine. The rooms were mine. I possessed every legitimate claim to decide who entered and who left, yet my authority seemed to exist only insofar as other people voluntarily recognized it.

    I had entered a state of Sovereignty Erosion: the nightmare sensation of watching authority over one’s own territory gradually dissolve. You own the house. You issue the commands. You possess every legal and moral claim to the space. Yet strangers stroll through your kitchen, shower in your bathroom, film watch videos in your atrium, and behave as though your sovereignty were merely a suggestion awaiting their approval.

    The most frightening intruders, apparently, don’t break down the door.

    They walk through it and wonder why you’re making such a fuss.

  • The Rearview Great White

    The Rearview Great White

    This morning I drove my daughter and her friend from Torrance to Knott’s Berry Farm, a forty-minute journey that included the usual Southern California ritual of surrendering a portion of one’s life to the freeway.

    On the 91 East, I settled into the diamond lane and soon acquired a companion: a pearl-white Toyota Grand Highlander attached to my rear bumper.

    He stayed there for roughly twelve miles.

    I wasn’t crawling. The driver simply wanted to go faster, and apparently the laws of physics required that he communicate this desire by positioning several thousand pounds of Toyota close enough to inspect the stitching on my back seat.

    About five miles before the Beach Boulevard exit, traffic began slowing. I soon saw why. Two lanes to my right was a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

    Everyone underwent the customary freeway conversion.

    Brake lights appeared.

    Speedometers suddenly became objects of intense scholarly interest.

    Drivers who had been doing eighty-five seconds earlier discovered within themselves a deep and previously unsuspected commitment to public safety.

    The Grand Highlander, however, had apparently missed the announcement.

    He illegally crossed out of the diamond lane, accelerated past me, and continued charging ahead.

    I watched with fascination.

    Surely he’ll see the CHP.

    He didn’t.

    Surely he’ll slow down.

    He didn’t.

    Then he passed the patrol car.

    The CHP officer noticed him immediately.

    The cruiser pulled out.

    It moved behind the Highlander.

    And at that moment, the entire psychological structure of the freeway changed.

    The Highlander hit the brakes.

    Too late.

    The lights came on.

    This is what I call The Rearview Great White: that primitive surge of terror you experience when a police cruiser appears behind you with its lights flashing and you realize, after several desperate seconds of denial, that you are the intended meal.

    There is always that brief period of bargaining.

    Maybe he’s after somebody else.

    You change lanes.

    He changes lanes.

    Maybe he needs me to move aside.

    You move farther right.

    He follows.

    The fin is circling.

    Imagine swimming a hundred yards offshore at Redondo Beach and seeing the dorsal fin of a great white shark rise from the water behind you.

    That’s close enough.

    The Highlander driver, who moments earlier had been exercising dominion over the 91 Freeway, was now prey.

    I expected to feel some schadenfreude.

    I didn’t.

    Partly because I’ve driven more aggressively than I should have myself. Moral superiority becomes difficult when the prosecution has access to your own driving record.

    More importantly, I didn’t think his behavior quite deserved the emotional death penalty.

    On my personal Aggression Scale, I’d give him a six.

    Annoying? Absolutely.

    Reckless? Certainly.

    But I’ve seen eights and nines—the true freeway psychopaths who cross four lanes at ninety miles an hour as though auditioning for a role in Grand Theft Auto: Gardena.

    Had the Highlander been an eight, I might have enjoyed watching the CHP cruiser descend upon him like divine judgment.

    At six, I mostly felt sorry for him.

    I told my passengers that the poor guy was probably hyperventilating.

    Because seeing the lights is only the beginning.

    Now you have to pull over.

    This sounds easy until your nervous system has reverted to that of a gazelle being pursued across the Serengeti. You must find a safe location, activate the turn signal, change lanes, slow down, and demonstrate to the officer that you’re a stable citizen rather than someone about to flee the country.

    Then comes the roadside personality transformation.

    The aggressive driver disappears.

    The tailgater disappears.

    The man who fifteen seconds earlier regarded traffic laws as suggestions issued by lesser men is gone.

    In his place appears the most agreeable citizen in California.

    “Yes, Officer.”

    “Absolutely, Officer.”

    “Of course, Officer.”

    Meanwhile, his shirt is soaked through. His back is glued to the seat. His heart is trying to escape through his sternum.

    The Highlander followed the CHP cruiser down the offramp toward Knott’s Berry Farm, and I continued on my way.

    No triumph.

    No fist pump.

    Just sympathy for a man who had spent twelve miles imagining himself the predator.

    Then he looked in his rearview mirror.

    And saw the fin.

  • Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    About fifteen years ago, one of my students wrote a personal narrative about losing herself. She was in middle school. Her friends persuaded her to dress in extremely suggestive clothing with tons of makeup. In a revealing outfit that would have caused her mother to have a brain hemorrhage, she looked in the mirror and started crying. “I didn’t even recognize the girl staring back at me,” she wrote. “I wiped the makeup off, got back in my regular clothes, ran home, and cried in bed.” 

    I thought about that image as I started working on some writing prompts for the Fall Semester in which my eighteen-year-old college freshmen contrast writing with AI and writing “natty,” to use an expression that describes “natural” bodybuilders who don’t take performance-enhancing drugs. Generative AI can be a great writing tool, but it tends to overdo everything. Our writing becomes that crying overdone girl staring back at herself, or the bloated bodybuilder who is more cartoon than a celebration of the physique. In all of that generative AI, something gets lost. 

    Us. 

    We can hardly be blamed. Generative AI can feel like magic, taking a 300-word idea and blowing it up into a 2,000-word essay with vivid descriptions, highly stylized metaphors and witticisms, and Socratic rhetorical flourish. Eventually, we begin to believe we are the source of that 2,000-word essay. We flatter ourselves to our own detriment. We lose authenticity. We lose ourselves. We are that middle school girl staring into the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back at us. 

    Using AI tools with my students for the last four years, I can say from personal experience that writing natty feels cleansing, like going off sugar-laden processed foods. Just as too much dessert causes diabetes of the body, too much generative AI causes diabetes of the mind and soul. We need to carve out natural writing spaces where we can connect with who we truly are before it’s too late. 

  • Autobiographical Time Lag

    Autobiographical Time Lag

    I am obsessed with accurate watches. I own radio-controlled G-Shocks that communicate with atomic clocks in the middle of the night, correcting themselves so that I don’t have to endure the indignity of being three seconds late to nowhere. I put them near windows to improve reception, check whether they synchronized overnight, and derive absurd satisfaction from knowing that the watch on my wrist agrees with official time down to the second.

    Yet I’ve recently discovered an embarrassing irony: while my watches keep nearly perfect time, the clock inside my head is hopelessly slow. Ask me how long I’ve been teaching, lifting weights, trying to write books, or engaging in any of my other lifelong enterprises, and I routinely misplace entire decades. My G-Shock may be off by half a second. My autobiographical clock is off by twenty years.

    This discrepancy recently surfaced in a dream about my friend Adam, whom I’ve known since 1998, when he took my college writing class. Adam went on to build a successful career in advertising and branding, married, had a daughter, and now works from home. Perhaps because of his professional expertise, my dreaming mind decided that Adam was precisely the man to stage an intervention.

    With my retirement approaching, he apparently concluded that my malfunctioning internal clock required professional attention. He took me to an office specializing in something I didn’t know existed: the rebranding of human beings.

    I was immediately suspicious.

    “Rebranding” is one of those words that makes me reach instinctively for my wallet. I imagined consultants with expensive eyeglasses explaining that retirement represented an exciting opportunity to “reimagine my personal narrative” while helping me establish an Instagram presence in which I would pose beside cappuccinos and announce that sixty-five was the new forty-five.

    No thanks.

    But the woman assigned to me wasn’t like that.

    She was maternal, down-to-earth, dressed in jeans and a football jersey. No power suit. No TED Talk headset. No laminated diagram explaining My Journey. She had the reassuring manner of someone who might help you change a tire and then send you home with a casserole.

    She explained that retirement required more than leaving my job.

    I had to reinvent myself.

    Worse, I had to rebrand myself.

    I prepared to resist, but something about her practical manner disarmed me. Fine. Ask your questions.

    She began with the basics.

    How old was I?

    How many years had I been teaching?

    How long had I been trying to write novels?

    How many years had I been trying to lose weight?

    How long had I been lifting weights?

    Easy questions.

    Except I got nearly every answer wrong.

    Not slightly wrong.

    I was shaving decades off my life.

    “How long have you been teaching writing?”

    “About twenty years.”

    She looked at her records.

    “Forty.”

    Oh.

    Next question.

    “How long have you been lifting weights?”

    “Forty years.”

    Another glance at the paperwork.

    “Fifty-four.”

    Excuse me?

    Apparently I had begun lifting weights sometime during the Nixon administration and simply neglected to update my internal records.

    The interrogation continued.

    Every number I produced was suspiciously flattering. Years disappeared from my career. Decades vanished from my ambitions. Entire geological periods evaporated from my biography.

    I had apparently been cooking the chronological books.

    That’s when I realized I suffered from Autobiographical Time Lag: the discrepancy between one’s actual age and the age assumed by one’s interior sense of self.

    I know how old I am.

    Of course I do.

    But apparently some deeper part of my brain does not.

    That brain maintains a fraudulent set of books in which everything happened twenty years ago. I’ve been teaching for twenty years. I’ve been lifting for forty. I’ve been struggling with my weight for a while. I’ve been trying to become a writer for a reasonable amount of time.

    Then the auditor from the Department of Time arrives.

    Forty years.

    Fifty-four years.

    Decades.

    Decades.

    More decades.

    The horror of aging is partly numerical. You don’t experience yourself as a stack of calendar pages. Consciousness feels continuous. The thirteen-year-old who picked up his first weights doesn’t seem like some extinct ancestor whose bones were recently discovered beneath a shopping mall.

    He’s me.

    I can still feel him in there.

    So my brain performs an enormous act of biographical compression. It takes fifty-four years of lifting weights and somehow files them under “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

    But fifty-four years isn’t a long time.

    It’s a civilization.

    I’ve been lifting weights longer than many of the people I work with have been alive. Presidents have come and gone. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Internet appeared. Phones became computers. Artificial intelligence began helping me write essays about how old I am.

    And through all of it, apparently, I’ve been doing curls.

    The same distortion applies to teaching. Forty years sounds preposterous. Surely I haven’t been standing in front of college writing classes for four decades.

    But I have.

    I’ve taught through chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, Canvas, online instruction, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. At this point I’m less a professor than a sedimentary record of educational technology.

    The woman in the football jersey understood something I didn’t.

    Before I could reinvent myself for retirement, I had to locate myself accurately on the map of chronological time.

    I couldn’t begin the next chapter while pretending I was halfway through the previous one.

    That, I realized, was the purpose of the strange rebranding office. They weren’t going to manufacture some shiny post-retirement identity for me. They weren’t going to turn me into Professor 2.0, complete with a podcast, personal logo, and inspirational LinkedIn posts about embracing change.

    They were performing an intervention.

    The first step wasn’t reinvention.

    It was arithmetic.

    I kept giving the woman the age of the man I felt myself to be.

    She kept giving me the age of the man who actually existed.

    And the numbers refused to negotiate.

    Perhaps that’s the strangest thing about getting older. The calendar ages with perfect accuracy, but my autobiographical clock is running slow.

  • Snackrilege

    Snackrilege

    Introduced by Kellogg’s in 1968, Danish Go-Rounds occupied a category all their own. Imagine Pop-Tarts after several years studying pastry in Paris. Their flaky crust gave way to spirals of buttery dough wrapped around cinnamon and brown sugar with a generosity that suggested someone in the Kellogg’s test kitchen still believed breakfast deserved dignity.

    Then, sometime in the mid-1970s, they vanished.

    Kellogg’s discontinued Danish Go-Rounds while allowing Pop-Tarts to inherit the earth.

    I have never recovered.

    Pop-Tarts always struck me as breakfast designed by an engineering committee. They possessed all the emotional warmth of corrugated cardboard lightly dusted with cinnamon. They were perfectly adequate, which is often the first warning sign that something wonderful has been sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

    The disappearance of Danish Go-Rounds taught me an early lesson about consumer culture. Companies rarely announce that they are replacing excellence with mediocrity. They simply assure you that “customers prefer the new product,” as though an anonymous focus group had voted to replace Mozart with elevator music.

    Perhaps they did.

    As a child, however, I interpreted the loss with the disproportionate seriousness children reserve for the destruction of sacred things. A glorious breakfast civilization had collapsed. The pastry aristocracy had been guillotined, leaving only processed commoners to occupy the throne.

    Looking back, I realize Danish Go-Rounds became more than breakfast.

    They became a symbol.

    Their disappearance seemed to foreshadow a broader cultural transition, one in which craftsmanship quietly yielded to optimization, distinction surrendered to standardization, and memorable pleasures were gradually replaced by products that offended no one because they inspired no one. Before long came a parade of aggressively modern food innovations: Imperial Margarine, Tang, Space Food Sticks, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, SlimFast, and enough chemically enhanced convenience foods to make future nutritionists wonder whether the twentieth century had briefly declared war on its own digestive system.

    Of course, this is nostalgia talking.

    The 1970s produced plenty of culinary atrocities alongside their occasional masterpieces. Memory edits generously. It preserves the triumphs and quietly escorts the embarrassments out the back door.

    Still, I cannot think about Danish Go-Rounds without arriving at what I now call Snackrilege.

    Snackrilege is the profanation of a beloved food through its discontinuation, reformulation, or replacement with an inferior mass-market substitute, producing the irrational conviction that civilization itself has taken a wrong turn.

    Snackrilege is not ordinary disappointment.

    It is culinary apostasy.

    It is watching a corporation demolish a cathedral and replace it with a parking garage while issuing a cheerful press release explaining that parking is more convenient for everyone.

    The object itself hardly matters. One person’s Danish Go-Rounds are another person’s original Butterfinger, Jell-O 1-2-3, Marathon Bar, or McDonald’s fried apple pie. Every generation possesses its own edible relics, foods whose disappearance feels strangely personal because they were quietly woven into the emotional architecture of childhood.

    That is why Snackrilege has so little to do with pastries.

    What we mourn is not merely the loss of a favorite flavor but the disappearance of a small piece of the world that first taught us comfort, delight, and the reassuring illusion that the best things would always be there waiting for us.

    Then one day they aren’t.

    And someone hands us a Pop-Tart with a perfectly straight face.

  • The Geekee Principle

    The Geekee Principle

    My first great love was not a person.

    It was a blanket.

    Its official name has long since been forgotten, but I christened it Geekee, a name that made perfect sense to a toddler and none whatsoever to anyone else. Geekee was once white satin. By the time I entered preschool, however, it had evolved into something that looked less like bedding than forensic evidence. It was stained, yellowed, threadbare, and perfumed with an aroma my parents described as “disgusting” and I regarded as the unmistakable scent of home.

    Geekee accompanied me everywhere.

    At bedtime I rubbed its frayed corners against my cheek or twisted one into my mouth, reenacting the long-forgotten comfort of infancy. Modern psychologists would probably call it a transitional object. I called it civilization.

    My parents, unfortunately, belonged to the Anti-Geekee Party.

    They insisted I was too old for it.

    “It stinks.”

    “It looks terrible.”

    “People are going to think we can’t afford another blanket.”

    They saw a filthy piece of cloth.

    I saw emotional life support.

    The debate continued until we moved from Florida to California.

    Somewhere along a lonely stretch of highway, my father executed one of the cleverest confidence schemes of my childhood.

    “Look!” he shouted through the windshield. “A baby alligator!”

    Naturally, I turned to the opposite window, searching the roadside for the tiny reptile.

    That was all the opening he needed.

    With the efficiency of a seasoned CIA operative disposing of classified documents, my father snatched Geekee from my hands, rolled down his window, and launched it into history.

    By the time I turned back around, Geekee had vanished.

    I was inconsolable.

    “Stop the car!” I screamed.

    “We have to go back!”

    My father remained perfectly calm.

    “The wind took it.”

    I refused to believe him.

    Then he delivered the lie that permanently transformed the story.

    “The baby alligator found Geekee.”

    I stopped crying.

    “He doesn’t have a mother,” my father explained. “He’s cold. He needs your blanket more than you do.”

    Children possess a remarkable willingness to believe impossible things, provided those things are morally satisfying.

    The image immediately formed in my mind: a lonely baby alligator wrapped snugly inside my beloved blanket somewhere beside the road, warm because of my sacrifice.

    My grief did not disappear.

    It changed direction.

    Instead of mourning what I had lost, I found myself quietly pleased that someone else had gained it.

    Looking back, I realize my father had stumbled upon what I now call The Geekee Principle: the recognition that we surrender our deepest childhood attachments most successfully when they are absorbed into a larger story of generosity, purpose, or love. We rarely outgrow comfort by force. We outgrow it by discovering something that matters more than our comfort.

    Simply telling me to “grow up” would have failed spectacularly.

    Children rarely surrender enchantment because adults lecture them about maturity.

    They surrender one enchantment only after being offered another.

    My father understood this instinctively.

    He did not replace Geekee with logic.

    He replaced it with compassion.

    Years later, I began noticing that adults possess their own versions of Geekee.

    Some clutch prestigious careers long after those careers have become prisons.

    Others cling to collections, political identities, social status, religious certainty, resentments, old romances, or carefully curated self-images that have ceased nourishing them years earlier.

    The object changes.

    The psychology does not.

    Every Geekee whispers the same promise:

    “Without me, you won’t be safe.”

    Sometimes it is true.

    Often it is merely familiar.

    Growth begins when we discover that the thing we cannot imagine living without may actually be preventing us from becoming the person we were meant to become.

    The tragedy is that adults rarely have fathers willing to invent baby alligators for them.

    Instead, life performs the theft itself.

    A layoff.

    A divorce.

    A diagnosis.

    A death.

    A market crash.

    The prized possession disappears through the window before we have time to tighten our grip.

    Only afterward do we ask whether the loss concealed an unexpected gift.

    I never saw Geekee again.

    Perhaps it landed in a ditch.

    Perhaps another motorist found it and wondered why someone had discarded what appeared to be the world’s saddest dishrag.

    Or perhaps, somewhere in the swamps of the Deep South, there once lived an unusually well-insulated baby alligator.

    At four years old, I believed that story completely.

    At sixty-four, I find myself believing something even stranger.

    The best lies are the ones that quietly tell the truth.

  • The Happiness Performance Principle

    The Happiness Performance Principle

    Before long I began to notice a curious couple on Facebook.

    Every single day they appeared together, smiling with such unwavering enthusiasm that they seemed less like two human beings than the official mascots of matrimonial bliss. Their grins possessed the tensile strength of industrial adhesives. Their faces radiated enough saccharine cheerfulness to put the greeting-card industry out of business. Every photograph announced the same message:

    Look how happy we are.

    A few years ago, I barely noticed them.

    Now I brace myself.

    Their daily appearances have become as predictable as sunrise and almost as obligatory. Every scroll through Facebook feels like waiting for a television commercial whose dialogue you already know by heart.

    I want to be fair to them.

    For all I know, they are generous friends, devoted parents, faithful spouses, and decent human beings. I would hate to commit the very sin social media encourages: reducing an entire person to a single online habit.

    Yet habits have consequences.

    When someone repeatedly performs happiness before an audience, the performance eventually overwhelms the happiness itself.

    The smiles stop looking spontaneous.

    They begin looking contractual.

    What once appeared joyful gradually acquires the unsettling atmosphere of a hostage video filmed inside a Pottery Barn catalog.

    The more insistently they proclaim their happiness, the more I find myself wondering what invisible anxiety demands such relentless reassurance.

    That reaction says as much about the audience as it does about the performers.

    Human beings possess surprisingly sensitive authenticity detectors. We do not expect perpetual happiness because we have never met anyone who actually lives that way. Real marriages contain grocery lists, bad moods, unpaid bills, stomach flu, arguments over thermostats, and long stretches of ordinary Tuesdays. They breathe.

    Curated happiness does not.

    It smiles.

    Constantly.

    The phenomenon illustrates what I call The Happiness Performance Principle: the tendency for repeated public displays of happiness to become progressively less convincing, eventually suggesting the insecurity they were meant to conceal.

    This does not mean the couple is secretly miserable.

    It means the performance has become louder than the reality.

    Paradoxically, genuine happiness rarely feels compelled to advertise itself. It is too busy living. It has no quarterly reporting requirements. It does not wake each morning asking, How can we reassure strangers that our marriage remains delightful?

    Incessant documentation changes the nature of the experience itself. The camera quietly becomes a third partner in the relationship. Every lunch, vacation, anniversary, sunset, and coffee date begins asking the same question:

    “Should we post this?”

    At that moment, life subtly shifts from being lived to being curated.

    The relationship acquires a marketing department.

    I sometimes wonder whether the saddest consequence of social media is not that it encourages vanity, but that it gradually replaces identity with performance. Careers disappear. Hobbies fade. Conversations are forgotten. Complexity evaporates.

    People become remembered for one repetitive act.

    This couple may have built remarkable lives. They may have overcome hardships I know nothing about. They may possess virtues worthy of admiration.

    Yet I suspect that to hundreds of acquaintances they have become something far smaller.

    They are simply the couple that always posts.

    That strikes me as a peculiar tragedy.

    A lifetime compressed into an algorithmic reflex.

    Not because they smile too much.

    But because somewhere along the way, their happiness stopped looking like a gift and started resembling a job.

  • The Smart-Right Principle

    The Smart-Right Principle

    One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading assignment with nearly an hour to spare. Faced with that glorious stretch of unclaimed childhood time, I did what any aspiring future contributor to Mad Magazine might have done.

    I built a submarine.

    Not an actual submarine, of course. I drew an enormous one on a sheet of white construction paper, complete with rows of portholes. Every window framed a tiny character, and every character had something ridiculous to say.

    One man was making pancakes and inviting the crew to breakfast.

    A woman with curlers in her hair refused to leave her cabin because she wasn’t presentable.

    Another sailor complained that his cereal box had promised a free toy that was nowhere to be found.

    Someone couldn’t nap because everyone else was making too much noise.

    Another had a piece of apple peel wedged between his teeth and regarded this minor inconvenience as civilization’s greatest crisis.

    The submarine was less a military vessel than an underwater apartment complex populated entirely by neurotics.

    I loved it.

    I imagined myself one day writing and illustrating absurd little worlds where everyone took trivial problems with magnificent seriousness.

    Then Mrs. Eckhart stopped beside my desk.

    Her red bouffant seemed to rise another inch as she studied my masterpiece. Her eyebrows arched with the unmistakable expression adults reserve for children who have somehow managed to disappoint them in unusually creative ways.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my classroom?” she asked.

    “I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was just drawing quietly.”

    She ignored my explanation.

    Instead, she began reading the dialogue bubbles aloud in a voice dripping with sarcasm. The class erupted in laughter.

    My submarine, moments earlier the crown jewel of my artistic career, had become evidence in a public trial.

    Then came the sentence.

    “I want your parents to sign this.”

    She turned the paper over and wrote a note explaining that I had spent class drawing cartoons instead of doing schoolwork.

    That evening I presented the evidence to my father.

    He read the note.

    He looked at me.

    Then he sighed.

    “You pissed off your teacher.”

    “I don’t know why,” I protested. “I finished my work. I wasn’t bothering anybody.”

    “That doesn’t matter.”

    “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

    “You insulted her.”

    I stared at him.

    “I don’t understand.”

    He leaned back in his chair.

    “By finishing early and drawing cartoons, you told her her work wasn’t challenging enough.”

    “But I never said that.”

    “You didn’t have to.”

    “I wasn’t criticizing her.”

    “She thought you were.”

    I still resisted.

    “But I was right.”

    My father nodded.

    “Maybe.”

    Then he delivered one sentence I have remembered for more than half a century.

    “It’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    At ten years old, I found this profoundly irritating.

    “I thought they were the same thing.”

    “They aren’t.”

    He explained that technical correctness and practical wisdom often occupy different neighborhoods.

    Perhaps I had violated no classroom rule.

    Perhaps I had every right to draw after completing my assignment.

    None of that altered the outcome.

    My teacher felt disrespected.

    Once that happened, being right became largely irrelevant.

    Only years later did I understand that my father had given me a lesson far more valuable than any fifth-grade reading assignment.

    He had introduced me to The Smart-Right Principle: the recognition that factual correctness often matters less than the social intelligence required to achieve a constructive outcome. Winning the argument while damaging the relationship is rarely a genuine victory.

    Children naturally believe that justice consists of discovering who is objectively correct.

    Adults eventually discover that human beings seldom react to objective correctness.

    They react to perceived respect.

    Or disrespect.

    Intention often loses to interpretation.

    I intended nothing more inflammatory than entertaining myself after finishing my work.

    Mrs. Eckhart interpreted my drawing as a silent declaration that her assignment had failed to occupy me.

    Whether she was objectively right no longer mattered.

    Her perception became reality.

    I have watched this drama replay itself countless times throughout adulthood.

    Employees prove their managers wrong while destroying their careers.

    Husbands win arguments that cost them intimacy.

    Politicians deliver devastating rebuttals that persuade no one.

    Professors publicly expose weak reasoning while privately humiliating students who might otherwise have remained eager to learn.

    Every participant leaves convinced that truth prevailed.

    Usually only resentment does.

    The Smart-Right Principle does not ask us to abandon truth.

    It asks us to recognize that truth travels through relationships.

    People rarely remember whether you were technically correct.

    They remember how you made them feel while proving it.

    Ironically, my father never suggested that Mrs. Eckhart had behaved wisely.

    He simply understood something I did not.

    Life is not graded like a geometry proof.

    You do not receive full credit merely because your logic is impeccable.

    Human beings are not propositions.

    They are creatures of pride, dignity, insecurity, gratitude, vanity, and interpretation.

    Ignore those realities, and you may spend the rest of your life winning arguments while quietly losing people.