Cinemorphosis

Tag: fantasy

  • Escape from Margaritaville

    Escape from Margaritaville

    I recently dreamed I was in a public park. The grass was cartoonishly green, a kind of chlorophyll utopia, and families sprawled across it as if they’d been carefully arranged for a Chamber of Commerce brochure. My suitcase sat at my side. I felt lost. Like a misplaced airport refugee, I looked up.

    Looming above the park was a billboard—a monstrosity of sun-bleached cheer—featuring a leathery couple in their seventies. They were bronzed like overcooked turkeys, grinning wide, basking in the eternal glow of some Florida condo where “Margaritaville” played on an endless loop.

    The “Margaritaville” billboard—two geriatric smiles frozen in sunlit rapture—reminded me that I’d been meaning to watch Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages, that gargantuan playground for the aged about forty-five miles from Orlando.

    Deep down, I knew I needed to watch this documentary. I was born in Florida, and as my retirement crept closer and closer, I felt an urge to return home. I love the smell of mangos and coconuts at night. Nostalgia is a potent drug. It could cause me to sell my home and buy a condo in Orlando.

    So I watched the documentary. It was the opposite of a travel infomercial. It was a horror movie. It started with synchronized water ballet to Neil Sedaka and margarita-fueled Parrothead parties. The Villages are marketed as heaven with a tiki umbrella on top, but for anyone with taste, patience, or shame, the place looks more like an early-onset hell: a tropical gulag where you pay people to micromanage your leisure until leisure itself becomes a program of infantilization.

    The film’s most disturbing subject is Dennis Dean—an eighty-one-year-old small-time grifter wanted for a DUI in California, living out of a blue van on the edge of The Villages and scheming his way into the bed of a rich widow. He prowls bingo halls and church socials with the persistence of a con man who has practiced charm until it has fossilized. When police finally close in, Dennis slips back into Nancy’s apartment. In a scene that sticks with you, he lies on her bed while she calls from the kitchen: “Lunch!” He finds his new girlfriend, whom he’s leeching off, annoying. He doesn’t move. He stares at the ceiling fan as if it were a slow, merciless clock, and you can see, plain as day, that comfort can become a prison for someone whose last liberty was earned through deceit. As I watched Dennis staring at the ceiling fan, it hit me: He’s in purgatory.

    The director never sneers at his subjects. Pain and longing are shown with a kind of blunt respect. But the portrait of The Villages itself isn’t charitable. It’s a retirement complex caught in mid-regression, a carnival mirror reflecting geriatrics clinging to perpetual adolescence until the spectacle curdles into something queasy and cringe-worthy. The managed fun—shuffleboard courts, themed parties, and scheduled joy—becomes a machine that demands you perform your own amusement. It’s not freedom. It’s occupation by leisure.

    And yes, I realized, sitting there with my pride intact and my Florida fantasies suddenly damp, that watching this must have been my wife’s brilliant little psy-ops operation. For a year, I’d been nagging her about moving the family to Florida—stilt houses, salt air, a hammock with my name on it. She was skeptical about moving to Florida. She mentioned hurricanes and unavailable flood insurance, for starters. Florida also had a reputation for government corruption, contractor fraud, and credit card theft. When her credit card was used fraudulently and she called her bank, the customer service agent asked, “You weren’t in Florida recently, were you?”

    In fact, she was.

    Florida was not paradise. It was a crime syndicate.

    She did not discourage me from watching Some Kind of Heaven. She didn’t have to. The documentary demolished my fantasy of returning to my home state within the first thirty seconds, with its water ballet and sedated margaritas. My obsession evaporated.

    But only for a minute.

    After a quick snack, I was back at my computer looking at luxury condos in Henderson, Nevada.

  • The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    The Road to Hell Has Excellent Lumbar Support

    Popular psychology has taken Carl Jung’s sprawling ideas about psychological development and compressed them into a tidy Four Stages of Life paradigm. The scheme is probably too neat to be Jung, but it is useful nonetheless, especially if you are approaching retirement and wondering whether the final decades of life will produce wisdom or merely better lumbar support.

    In the first stage, adolescence, you are supposedly the Athlete. You are acutely conscious of your body, appearance, appetites, and sexual power. Self-awareness remains under construction. You occupy the center of the universe and assume everyone else has been assigned supporting roles. You fantasize about dominance, dislike being challenged, and naturally prefer the company of people who recognize your magnificence. If invited to someone else’s birthday party, some primitive corner of your psyche wonders why your name isn’t on the cake. “Athlete” seems far too charitable. I prefer Imperial Narcissist.

    Then adulthood throws you into competition. You acquire a career, make money, take action, climb hierarchies, accumulate trophies, and cultivate a reputation as “a force to be reckoned with.” Hugh Hefner supplied the operating philosophy: Work hard, play hard. You want money, sexual success, professional status, and that most intoxicating commodity of all—respect. The popular Jungian formulation calls this figure the Warrior. I prefer Status Gladiator. He experiences adulthood as an arena with an invisible scoreboard hanging over it, and he checks the standings constantly to make sure his name hasn’t slipped.

    If life goes reasonably well, however, the trophies eventually lose some of their phosphorescence. The expensive car becomes a car. The promotion becomes another job with more email. Sexual conquest begins to resemble an exhausting administrative project. You start wondering whether the purpose of existence might involve something beyond accumulating evidence that you have defeated other people. The Jungian term attributed to this stage is Statesman. I prefer The Man Tired of the Bullshit. He has not necessarily become a saint. He has simply developed enough pattern recognition to notice that status, ambition, possessions, and applause make lousy gods.

    Finally comes the stage usually called Spirit. Here you stop looking for transcendence in a Mercedes and begin looking for the genuine article: love, generosity, service, connection, perhaps God. “Spirit,” however, feels too vaporous for me. My mind goes instead to the famous 1971 “Hilltop” Coca-Cola commercial, with people from around the world standing on an Italian hillside holding bottles of Coke and singing about peace and harmony. They practically glow. This is Radiant Man. He has undergone a metamorphosis. He no longer needs to dominate the room because he is no longer terrified of disappearing inside it. His strength has become generosity. He beams outward.

    The graceful trajectory of aging, then, is to move through these stages rather than establish permanent residency in one of them. Shed the old skins. Outgrow the Imperial Narcissist. Survive the Status Gladiator. Become tired of the bullshit. With luck, arrive at retirement age radiating enough benevolence that other people do not instinctively flee when they see you approaching.

    Unfortunately, modern culture has constructed an enormous industrial complex devoted to preventing this development. It does not particularly want Radiant Man. Radiant Man is bad for business. He already has enough. He doesn’t need another trophy, another grievance, another sexual conquest, another luxury object, another algorithm telling him how important he is. Consumer culture has much greater use for the Imperial Narcissist: the adolescent who refuses to vacate adolescence and possesses enough adult money to finance the occupation.

    Such a man spends his life constructing what I call an Adolescent Fortress. Every purchase, possession, sycophant, grievance narrative, algorithm, and carefully selected media source becomes another brick in the wall protecting him from reality. Eventually he suffers from Adolescent Fortress Syndrome: the lifelong construction of a psychological kingdom into which adult correction cannot penetrate. From inside, the fortress looks like sovereignty. From outside, it looks like a sixty-five-year-old man wearing the costume of a king while hiding from anyone willing to tell him the truth.

    Jon Ronson introduces an astonishing specimen of this condition in The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men: Christopher Mark, owner of a Gothic castle in Woodstock, Connecticut. Mark, approaching his mid-sixties, inhabits a medieval fantasy world of elaborate clothing, exotic animals, darkened rooms, and women who address him as “My lord.” His guard dog is named Cerberus, after the multiheaded hound guarding the gates of Hades. Camels wander the grounds. The drapes remain closed. Hugh Hefner is his North Star. The Playboy Mansion has been reincarnated as a Gothic fortress, as if Dracula had purchased a subscription to Maxim.

    Ronson first visits the castle after his son encounters the place under the pretense of attending a party. What they discover is considerably darker: a wealthy man in his sixties attempting to convert an adolescent harem fantasy into a reality television show called 101 Princesses. The number itself contains the pathology. Why one princess when you can have 101? And why 101 when, if the experiment somehow succeeded, the appetite would inevitably demand 1,001?

    Thomas Aquinas had a word for this: concupiscence, the disordered appetite that grows hungrier as you feed it. The promise is satisfaction; the mechanism guarantees dissatisfaction. You keep adding women, possessions, attention, status, spectacle, and power, expecting the next acquisition to fill the void. Instead, the void develops an appetite of its own. Psychiatrist Phil Stutz describes a related condition as living in the “lower channel,” where existence contracts around immediate gratification rather than purpose. Whatever terminology you prefer, the destination looks much the same: entropy. Or, to borrow Ronson’s word, unraveling.

    What makes Mark particularly useful to someone contemplating retirement is his conspicuous absence of guardrails. An heir to a fortune, he never had to build his adult life around employment. No boss expected him at nine. No colleagues depended on him. No students awaited him. No HR department required him to sit through sexual-harassment training. No professional code periodically forced his ego to accommodate the irritating existence of other people. What sounds like magnificent freedom begins to resemble the Guardrail Deficit: the absence of work, schedules, bosses, deadlines, colleagues, and professional expectations that periodically force us into contact with reality.

    We complain bitterly about these constraints while quietly benefiting from them. Work makes us shower. Deadlines make us finish things. Colleagues make us compromise. Students make us explain ourselves. Institutions routinely irritate us, but irritation is sometimes the friction that prevents psychological free fall. Remove enough guardrails and the Imperial Narcissist can drive wherever his appetites point him.

    Mark therefore embodies what I call the Never-Employed Retiree Paradox. He has reached retirement age with nothing to retire from. The ordinary retiree loses the external structures of employment at sixty-five. Mark never acquired them. In that sense, he has been retired since adolescence, with no workplace, career, professional standards, or institutional obligations separating youthful fantasy from late-life reality. He possesses radical freedom and uses it to dress like medieval royalty while planning a reality show about acquiring 101 princesses. Apparently freedom without maturation does not produce Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it produces The Bachelor with camels.

    This brings me uncomfortably close to home.

    Most men cannot afford Gothic castles, exotic animals, and harems, but we have developed a more economical version of the Adolescent Fortress: the Man Cave. We carve out little kingdoms where reality agrees to leave us alone for a while. There is the football den with the enormous television, recliner, pizza, nachos, and master remote. On Married… with Children, Peggy Bundy understands that her husband Al’s deepest erotic fantasy is not another woman but a remote capable of controlling every television in the house. Absolute power, apparently, requires batteries.

    Watch enthusiasts have their own castles. I have spent embarrassing quantities of time watching YouTube videos in which grown men gather around expensive watches, conduct ceremonial unboxings, discuss “wrist presence,” and deliver solemn State of the Collection addresses as though NATO were awaiting their conclusions. The watch community becomes a tiny sovereign ecosystem with its own language, hierarchies, rituals, grails, and moat. The outside world may be collapsing, but inside the fortress we urgently need to determine whether forty-four millimeters is too large for a seven-and-a-quarter-inch wrist.

    And then there is my couch.

    Because the ordinary cushions proved inadequate for my 230-pound retired-linebacker chassis, I fortified the couch with a four-inch self-inflating camping mattress, stacked pillows, and a throw blanket. My daughters call it Dad’s Homeless Encampment. In the late afternoon, it exerts a gravitational pull. I lie there watching true-crime documentaries while eating red grapes, hummus, and Wheat Thins, observing homicide detectives restore order to a universe temporarily disrupted by murder.

    The documentaries are disturbing, but they are also strangely comforting. Chaos occurs. Detectives arrive. Evidence accumulates. The suspect lies. The detective catches the lie. Handcuffs appear. Order is restored. The narrative offers precisely what real life refuses to provide: control. Al Bundy has his master remote. The watch collector has his gleaming collection. The football fan has his nacho bunker. Christopher Mark has his Gothic castle and Cerberus. I have my padded couch and a homicide detective explaining why the suspect’s timeline makes no sense.

    None of these refuges is inherently pathological. Everyone needs respite. The danger begins when respite becomes habitat—when the place where you occasionally retreat from life becomes the place from which you conduct it. The fortress gets more comfortable. The moat gets wider. The drawbridge comes up more often. Eventually, freedom from irritation becomes freedom from challenge, freedom from obligation, freedom from other people, and finally freedom from reality itself.

    That is what makes Christopher Mark more than an eccentric character in someone else’s book. For a man approaching retirement, he is a warning. Employment has spent forty years dragging me out of the house, making demands upon me, exposing me to people I did not choose, and preventing my padded couch from becoming the geographical center of my existence. Soon those guardrails will disappear.

    So when late afternoon arrives and I lower myself onto four inches of premium camping foam, arrange my pillows, pull the blanket across my legs, open the Wheat Thins, and watch a homicide detective interrogate a suspect while Cerberus sleeps safely several states away, I do not feel myself approaching the incandescence of Radiant Man.

    I feel like I may already be retired.

  • The Vanity Portal

    The Vanity Portal

    I have learned that something good can occasionally crawl out of an embarrassing place.

    For years, I have entertained a recurring fantasy so vainglorious that merely describing it makes me want to hide under a table. Yet somewhere inside this monument to my own magnificence, I discovered what I call The Vanity Portal: the strange passage through which a fantasy of being admired unexpectedly opens onto a sincere desire to become good.

    The fantasy takes me back to 1983. I am twenty years old again, working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, where I actually worked while attending college. But fantasy has renovated the premises. The wine bar now sits conveniently beside a grand piano, because apparently my unconscious has obtained an unlimited remodeling budget.

    I am not merely an employee.

    I am the entertainment.

    I even have a stage name:

    Lachyrmose.

    There is a ritual to my appearances.

    I am in the beer box, tearing apart cardboard cartons and doing the grubby work of a liquor-store employee, while customers at the wine bar begin demanding music.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    I make them wait.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    Eventually I emerge from the beer box looking like a survivor of industrial combat. Shreds of cardboard cling to my clothes. A sharp carton has scratched my face. My arms bear little cuts and bruises. I am exhausted.

    This is crucial to the fantasy.

    I cannot simply be a gifted pianist. That would be insufficiently magnificent. I must also be a working-class hero who has just finished wrestling cases of beer before casually sitting down at a grand piano and revealing the soul of Rachmaninoff.

    The customers grow quiet.

    Lachyrmose begins to play.

    Melancholy music fills the wine bar.

    On one particularly ambitious occasion, Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett happen to be sitting among the customers. They are staying at the nearby Claremont Hotel and have wandered into Jackson’s for a little wine and relaxation.

    Naturally, they are astonished.

    Who is this young man?

    Minutes ago he was dismantling beer cartons. Now he is producing music of heartbreaking beauty with a completely formed artistic voice. Gabriel and Hackett exchange glances. They understand immediately that they have stumbled upon some rare creature—a bruised liquor-store employee with the soul of a European composer.

    At this point the fantasy has become so narcissistic that it should probably require a permit.

    But then someone else enters it.

    A homeless woman.

    Unlike Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett, she comes from an actual memory.

    I remember seeing her near Jackson’s wearing a red wig she had apparently found in a dumpster. She stood before the reflective glass of a newspaper rack, admiring herself in her new acquisition. The wig was garish and artificial, but she looked at her reflection with pleasure. For a moment, this discarded object had given her something beautiful.

    In my fantasy, she joins the customers at the wine bar.

    I begin playing.

    She listens for a while and then falls asleep.

    The melancholy piano music washes over her as she dozes in her ridiculous red wig. Peter Gabriel listens. Steve Hackett listens. The wine drinkers listen. But gradually they cease to matter.

    When the recital ends, the woman wakes.

    She thanks me for the music.

    I give her a bag filled with deli sandwiches to take with her.

    Of course Gabriel and Hackett witness this too. My unconscious is not yet willing to surrender the production entirely. They were already impressed by my piano playing; now they discover that Lachyrmose is also a humanitarian.

    Apparently musical genius wasn’t enough.

    I required sainthood.

    But then the fantasy changes.

    The woman thanks me for the recital and the sandwiches, and I tell her that no thanks are necessary.

    It was an honor to play for her.

    And I mean it.

    That is the moment when I pass through The Vanity Portal.

    Something strange happens. The fantasy stops being entirely about admiration. Peter Gabriel disappears. Steve Hackett disappears. The wine bar disappears. Even Lachyrmose begins to disappear.

    There is only the woman in the red wig.

    And I love her.

    Not romantically. Not sentimentally. I feel an overwhelming tenderness toward this forgotten person who possesses nothing, who found a discarded wig and briefly admired herself in the glass of a newspaper rack.

    In the fantasy, I tell her that playing for her was an honor.

    But the tears aren’t imaginary.

    I am actually sitting at my piano, playing music and crying.

    This is what disturbs me about the fantasy and prevents me from dismissing it as mere narcissistic theater.

    I struggle with Christianity. I struggle with its doctrines, its claims about salvation, its diagnosis of the human condition, and the enormous theological machinery built around Jesus. I can argue with all of it.

    But in that moment at the piano, I experience something I can only describe as the love of Jesus.

    Not doctrine.

    Not theology.

    An impulse.

    The desire to look upon someone whom the world barely sees and regard serving her not as charity but as an honor.

    And suddenly my ridiculous fantasy has shown me something I didn’t know was there.

    I want to be good.

    I want a pure heart.

    Unfortunately, even my fantasy of purity arrives contaminated by vanity. I cannot simply feed a homeless woman. Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett must be sitting nearby taking notes. I cannot simply play the piano. I must emerge from the beer box bloodied by cardboard, sit before an awestruck audience, and reveal myself as Lachyrmose.

    The ego insists upon producing the show.

    But perhaps this is how The Vanity Portal works.

    We enter carrying our vanity, our fantasies, our desperate need to be admired. We imagine ourselves beautiful, talented, heroic, compassionate. The entire production may be absurd.

    Then, somewhere inside the performance, something genuine appears.

    The fantasy begins:

    Look at me.

    But if we’re fortunate, somewhere along the way another voice emerges:

    Look at her.

    And for a moment, we do.

  • The G-Shock Boys

    The G-Shock Boys

    For decades he devoted himself to mechanical dive watches.

    His collection consumed tens of thousands of dollars, countless evenings on watch forums, and enough YouTube viewing to qualify as graduate work in horology. Every purchase promised permanence. Every new bezel, movement, and dial texture whispered that contentment was only one more acquisition away.

    Then, almost by accident, he bought a humble resin Casio G-Shock with Multiband 6 and Tough Solar.

    Everything changed.

    For the first time in his adult life, he glanced at his wrist and saw not merely the time, but the correct time. Alongside it sat the date and the day of the week, all delivered with effortless certainty. No winding. No resetting. No wondering whether the movement had drifted six or seven seconds since breakfast.

    He had quietly crossed a border.

    He had left the Kingdom of Approximate Time and entered the Republic of Accurate Time.

    The conversion brought unexpected peace.

    It also brought guilt.

    He felt as though he had betrayed lifelong companions—the mechanical-watch enthusiasts with whom he had shared triumphs, disappointments, and endless debates about lume, bezel action, and the superiority of one Swiss caliber over another. His social-media tribe suddenly felt like an abandoned religion. He experienced disorientation, grief, and the peculiar emotional wreckage that accompanies every genuine conversion.

    Confused, he confided in a trusted colleague.

    The man listened patiently and nodded.

    “I think you’re ready,” he finally said.

    “Ready for what?”

    “The House of Resin.”

    Perched atop one of the hills in Palos Verdes stood a sprawling Mediterranean mansion known only among initiates as The House of Resin.

    It existed for one purpose: helping newly converted souls orient themselves to life inside Accurate Time.

    Desperate, our hero made the pilgrimage.

    The front door swung open to reveal a portly, smiling gentleman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sebastian Cabot. His cheerful eyes suggested that nothing in the universe surprised him anymore.

    “Welcome,” he said warmly. “I’m Jaunty.”

    The living room resembled an English country house designed by Casio. Bach cello suites floated through magnificent loudspeakers. Delicate porcelain cups brimmed with tea. Crackers of suspiciously exceptional quality circulated on silver trays.

    Around the room sat a dozen men.

    Every one of them wore a G-Shock.

    Every one of them looked profoundly uncomfortable, like survivors of a shipwreck who had somehow washed ashore in paradise but still missed the sinking vessel.

    After the tea had been poured and the crackers consumed, Jaunty’s smile disappeared.

    His posture stiffened.

    His eyes narrowed.

    “The time for pleasantries has ended.”

    Silence swallowed the room.

    “You are here because you have awakened. You have escaped Approximate Time, but you are not yet free. Freedom demands sacrifice.”

    He paused.

    “The first step is simple.”

    Another pause.

    “You will sell every mechanical watch you own.”

    A collective gasp swept through the room.

    “You will donate the proceeds to organizations that feed the hungry. Research them carefully. Find those worthy of your trust.”

    His voice softened.

    “You cannot carry two kingdoms on one wrist.”

    No one argued.

    The command possessed the quiet authority of Scripture.

    Within days the watches were gone.

    The strange thing was not the loss.

    It was what followed.

    Every man felt lighter.

    Younger.

    More awake.

    Many developed an overwhelming urge to walk for hours. During those solitary journeys, decades of buying, selling, flipping, chasing limited editions, and refreshing dealer websites replayed in vivid detail.

    They watched themselves as though observing strangers.

    Marionettes dancing on strings they had never noticed.

    As realization deepened, their pace quickened.

    Many found themselves crying.

    Not polite tears.

    Not cinematic tears.

    The deep, involuntary tears that arrive when an illusion finally surrenders.

    They no longer cared who saw them.

    The tears required no apology.

    The following week they returned.

    Each told essentially the same story.

    Jaunty nodded.

    “Excellent.”

    Then his expression darkened.

    “Do not mistake liberation for completion.”

    He explained that exhilaration would eventually give way to doubt, loneliness, and nostalgia. Recovery always progressed that way.

    Then he introduced Step Two.

    “You will train.”

    The men looked puzzled.

    “You will exercise four days each week. Lift weights. Swing kettlebells. Practice yoga. Climb ropes. Do calisthenics. I do not care what discipline you choose. Your body has spent years transporting your obsession. It is now time for your obsession to transport your body.”

    One participant timidly raised his hand.

    “Ever since selling my watches I’ve been walking two hours every day.”

    The others nodded enthusiastically.

    “So have we.”

    Jaunty smiled kindly.

    “Those are not workouts.”

    “What are they?”

    “Exorcisms.”

    The room fell silent.

    “They are necessary.”

    “But they do not count.”

    Within days the men discovered the irresistible simplicity of a twenty-five-pound kettlebell and an online instructor promising complete physical transformation through twelve exercises performed in a continuous one-hour circuit.

    Every garage became a monastery.

    Every kettlebell became a sacrament.

    By the third week something extraordinary began happening.

    Crows appeared.

    One landed on a fence and clearly announced,

    “Casio.”

    Another cried,

    “G-Shock.”

    A third declared,

    “Solar.”

    When the men nervously described these encounters, Jaunty beamed.

    “Entirely normal,” he assured them.

    “The crows always come.”

    “What should we do?”

    “Feed them breadcrumbs.”

    By the fourth week, no one arrived wearing ordinary clothes.

    Their bodies had changed.

    Their old wardrobes no longer fit—not physically or psychologically.

    Athletic clothing had become their natural attire.

    Their wrists displayed beloved G-Shocks with the quiet confidence formerly reserved for Swiss luxury.

    Jaunty surveyed them with unmistakable satisfaction.

    “You have completed your initiation.”

    He dimmed the lights.

    “For your graduation…”

    “…I have prepared a film.”

    The title appeared.

    THE G-SHOCK BOYS

    Part documentary.

    Part infomercial.

    Part religious testimony.

    It chronicled every stage of their transformation—from obsessive collectors imprisoned by luxury to cheerful disciples liberated by resin, solar charging, and atomic time.

    Against every expectation, the film became a worldwide sensation.

    Clips flooded social media.

    Millions watched.

    Soon the men found themselves traveling the globe, not to discuss watches, but to explain the strange freedom that arrived only after they stopped believing that another purchase could save them.

    They still wore watches.

    They had simply stopped asking them to tell them who they were.

  • The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    The First Forty-Eight Shows When the Fantasy Ends

    Twenty-six years ago, while I was teaching at Cal State Dominguez Hills, one of my students was a man in his late thirties who worked as a probation officer. Before that, he had been a prison guard. Our conversations often drifted from freshman composition to crime, punishment, and the psychology of offenders. One observation has stayed with me ever since. The older gang members, he explained, were rarely the ones who frightened him most. The “Old Gs” had lived long enough to understand consequences. They could negotiate, calculate, and occasionally be reasoned with. The truly terrifying offenders were the teenagers. They were impulsive, reckless, and detached from reality. They committed acts so irrational that even hardened career criminals regarded them with apprehension. “The Old Gs are scared of them,” he told me. At the time, the comment struck me as paradoxical. Today it feels almost self-evident.

    I have found myself thinking about that conversation while watching nearly a hundred episodes of The First 48, the remarkable series that follows homicide detectives as they race to solve murders before the trail grows cold. Again and again, the interrogation room fills with teenage boys. Many slump defiantly in their chairs, radiating annoyance rather than remorse, as though the detectives have interrupted an otherwise pleasant afternoon. They insist they know nothing. They deny what surveillance footage plainly shows. They contradict eyewitnesses with astonishing confidence, even when the evidence leaves virtually no room for doubt. Much of the violence appears heartbreakingly trivial—a slight, an insult, a perceived challenge to someone’s reputation. Masculinity has been reduced to performance: proving toughness, defending street credibility, and refusing to appear weak, no matter how catastrophic the consequences.

    The most revealing moments arrive when the performance finally begins to crack. Even after hours of deception, many of these teenagers continue demanding to be released. “I just want to go home,” they protest, genuinely bewildered that anyone would keep them in custody. Then comes the moment detectives often recognize before the suspect does. Watching through a one-way mirror, an investigator quietly observes, “It’s starting to dawn on him. He’s realizing this isn’t a game anymore.” You can almost see reality entering the room. Sometimes the teenager collapses into uncontrollable sobbing. Sometimes he erupts in rage, screaming at officers, pounding walls, or thrashing against restraints. The emotional explosion is not simply fear of prison. It is the violent collision between fantasy and consequence. The imaginary world in which bravado guaranteed invincibility suddenly gives way to one governed by handcuffs, courtrooms, grieving families, and prison sentences measured in decades.

    That, to me, is the deepest tragedy. These young offenders often seem to inhabit a fever dream in which they are the untouchable protagonists of their own stories, convinced that swagger, intimidation, or reputation can somehow suspend the ordinary laws of cause and effect. Reality arrives only after irreversible damage has been done—to victims, to families, and ultimately to themselves. One cannot help wondering how many parents, teachers, pastors, coaches, or counselors warned them where this road would lead. Perhaps they all did. But adolescence possesses a peculiar arrogance: the conviction that every caution applies to someone else. The young man who believes he is the smartest person in the room often discovers otherwise only after the interrogation begins. Every time I watch that realization settle across a suspect’s face, I hear my former student’s voice from twenty-six years ago. The Old Gs, he said, feared the teenagers—not because the teenagers were stronger or smarter, but because they had not yet learned that reality is undefeated.

  • The Gospel of the Golden Kiwi

    The Gospel of the Golden Kiwi

    Around seven this evening, I found myself in Target performing the small rituals of domestic survival. I drifted first to produce, where I stood contemplating six-packs of kiwis—those fuzzy, unglamorous orbs that look like they were designed by a committee that feared both beauty and commitment.

    To my left stood a blonde woman in black athletic tights, late thirties, hair cinched back by a black headband. Her eyes were ringed with the faint bruising of fatigue or life—or both. When she saw me reach for the kiwis, her face brightened with the sudden, evangelical urgency of someone who has found a truth and is no longer capable of keeping it to herself.

    “Have you ever bought the golden ones?”

    I nodded, already sensing the sermon.

    “I love those because you can eat the skin.”

    “I can do without the skin,” I said, hoping to signal that my relationship with fruit had boundaries.

    She leaned in, undeterred. “Don’t skip that part. That’s where you’re getting all your antioxidants, folate, vitamin E, and fiber.”

    She delivered this litany with the confidence of someone who had recently completed a deep dive into the internet’s temple of wellness influencers and emerged fluent in their catechism.

    “I’m a true believer in the kiwi,” I said, offering a diplomatic half-truth in the hopes of ending the exchange.

    It did not end the exchange.

    She urged me to seek out the golden kiwis and to consume them whole, skin and all, as though salvation itself depended on my willingness to chew through fuzz. I smiled, nodded, and executed a tactical retreat.

    She struck me as a fundamentally decent person, but I recognized the type. I’ve met her before in various incarnations: the recently converted, the self-reinvented, the earnest disciple of a new regimen. Somewhere in her recent past, there had likely been a fracture—addiction, heartbreak, loneliness—and now she clung to nutrition and fitness as both shield and scripture. Her enthusiasm, admirable in theory, had outrun her social calibration.

    Five minutes later, we encountered each other again in the granola aisle, approaching from opposite directions like two diplomats from uneasy nations. Our carts collided in that narrow space, and she immediately yielded.

    “You can go first.”

    The earlier fervor had drained from her. In its place was a kind of tentative humility, as though she had replayed the kiwi lecture in her mind and found it excessive. She seemed smaller now, slightly folded into herself, her previous confidence replaced by a quiet, almost visible self-consciousness.

    I sensed embarrassment, perhaps even shame—not because she had said anything offensive, but because she had revealed too much of herself too quickly. Now she was attempting restraint, but the adjustment hadn’t taken. The performance read not as composed but as deflated.

    The poor woman was unraveling in real time, her emotional weather shifting faster than she could dress for it.

    “No worries,” I said, and moved past her.

    Later, at home, I found myself thinking about her with sympathy. I know that impulse—the sudden surge of enthusiasm that spills over onto strangers, the desire to connect that arrives without a proper governor. I’ve been that person, pressing too hard, talking too much, revealing too quickly, only to retreat later into a private audit of one’s own excess.

    If I ever find myself eating golden kiwis, skin and all, I suspect I’ll pause for a moment and offer a small, private prayer for her—for whatever she’s trying to fix, and for the courage it takes to try fixing it in public.

  • Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    I shouldn’t indulge in self-pity or perform the aging writer’s ritual of staring mournfully into the middle distance while pretending the universe failed to recognize his genius. I have much to be grateful for. Still, as retirement approaches, I feel obligated to conduct a private audit of my creative life, and the results are complicated.

    At this stage, I imagined I would feel artistically established, as though decades of writing would eventually crystallize into some stable literary identity. Instead, every morning I wake up and begin again from scratch like a man rebuilding a sandcastle the tide erased overnight. I sit before the keyboard hoping language will once again perform its small daily miracle.

    To my credit, I recently completed a collection of eleven stories. That matters. The stories revolve around men whose obsessions slowly consume them: bodybuilders, hedonists, nihilists, dandies, counterfeit aristocrats, and assorted spiritual casualties wandering through the desert of modern American masculinity. I titled the collection What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?—which sounds either appropriately biblical or like the warning label on an energy drink marketed to divorced men in sports cars.

    The stories took years to finish because they were rewritten endlessly. Rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of rewrites. Entire paragraphs were dismantled and reconstructed so many times they resembled neighborhoods destroyed by artillery fire and rebuilt brick by brick. Yet I am grateful for the struggle because the stories finally feel as though they exist in the form they were always trying to reach. The characters and scenarios have haunted me for decades, lingering in my imagination like unresolved ghosts demanding literary exorcism. Finishing the book feels less like triumph than relief.

    I harbor no fantasy that these stories will suddenly launch me into literary celebrity. To keep myself psychologically grounded, I think about Rick Bass and his story collection The Watch from the 1990s. Those stories struck me as wild, profound, and emotionally unhinged in the best possible way—worthy of Gogol or Chekhov—yet Bass never ascended into the literary superstardom our culture reserves for a tiny handful of writers. He flourished artistically while remaining, to the broader public, relatively obscure.

    But obscurity is crowded with greatness.

    I think too of one of my favorite bands, The Trash Can Sinatras. I still remember standing inside a grimy T-shirt store on Hollywood Boulevard flipping through posters of The Smiths and Morrissey when “Obscurity Knocks” came over the speakers. The song hit me with such strange emotional precision that I immediately bought their album Cake and became a devotee for life.

    And yet did The Trash Can Sinatras become massively famous? Hardly.

    They nearly disappeared altogether before a small but stubborn online following revived them in the early 2000s. They continue making music today with almost monastic devotion despite occupying only a microscopic corner of the attention economy. As I write this, their official YouTube channel has roughly 3,500 subscribers—a number that feels morally absurd when one considers the beauty and intelligence of their music. In the metrics of the modern algorithmic carnival, they reside near the basement. In my mind, they stand near the summit.

    But perhaps my indignation itself reveals the problem.

    I keep imposing upon artists an American mythology that has been drilled into my brain since childhood: the myth of the self-made man. In this story, success arrives as visible conquest. The hero works relentlessly, overcomes humiliation and doubt, climbs the mountain, and finally receives public veneration, wealth, applause, and symbolic immortality. The crowd cheers. The parade begins. The nectar is consumed.

    Except reality rarely behaves this way.

    Many artists labor for decades, sharpen their craft, discover their authentic voice, and produce extraordinary work only to become beloved by small circles of devoted admirers rather than the masses. They are not failures. The dice simply landed where they landed. They flourished artistically without the bestseller list, Netflix adaptation, sold-out stadium, or blue-check coronation from the gods of cultural relevance.

    Even Dante Alighieri died in relative hardship. History later built the cathedral.

    As an American raised on success mythology—from Horatio Alger fantasies to that smug little children’s story about the train repeating “I think I can”—I find it difficult to fully abandon the fantasy that hard work eventually produces not merely accomplishment but wholeness. Somewhere deep inside me remains the childish belief that if I simply grind long enough, write hard enough, revise carefully enough, and suffer nobly enough, some grand validation ceremony awaits at the end.

    But one of the greatest scenes in The Wire dismantles that illusion with brutal clarity. Detective Lester Freamon warns Jimmy McNulty that police work will not save him. There is no grand parade waiting. No expensive watch. No final moment where the universe declares the suffering worthwhile. Lester tells him plainly: “This job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole.”

    That line haunts me because it applies to almost everything Americans worship.

    Career.
    Status.
    Achievement.
    Recognition.
    Fame.
    Productivity.

    We imagine these things will rescue us from our unfinished selves. But Lester understands the deeper truth: life is happening elsewhere while we wait for the grand moment of validation that never fully arrives. As he says, life is “the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

    What does it mean, then, to “get a life”?

    Perhaps it means accepting that there is no final coronation waiting beyond the horizon. No guaranteed fanfare. No cosmic scoreboard fairly distributing glory according to merit. Perhaps maturity means seeing clearly that art is not a vending machine where years of labor reliably produce fame and transcendence. Sometimes the reward is simply the work itself, the strange companionship of characters who haunted you into existence, and the small circle of people who genuinely understand what you made.

    Perhaps that has to be enough.

  • The Sacred Thud and the Beachside Alibi

    The Sacred Thud and the Beachside Alibi

    Last night I dreamed I visited a man who lived in an apartment not with furniture, but with his fleet of Lexus sedans, each one folded into suitcase-sized cardboard boxes like obscene luxury origami. When he carried them outside, they bloomed into full-sized cars—sleek, silent, and faintly smug. One in particular arrested me. It was labeled “brown,” a word that should have condemned it to mediocrity, but this was no pedestrian brown. It shimmered with a platinum undertone, a molten, aristocratic hue that made every other color feel like a clerical error.

    But the color was only the prelude. The real seduction was auditory. The man insisted I open and close the door. I obliged. The door shut with a dense, ceremonial thud—the kind of sound that suggests not merely engineering, but finality. It was the closing argument of a life well lived. I felt it in my chest, in my bones. At that moment, I understood with humiliating clarity that I would never feel complete until I owned this exact car in this exact shade and could summon that sacred thud on command. This, apparently, was my apotheosis.

    Once the demonstration concluded, he ushered me into his living room, where a large television glowed like an altar. It was tuned to CNN. On the screen: live coverage of his wife undergoing surgery for a rare and aggressive cancer. The procedure was experimental, a medical moonshot that, if successful, would not only save her life but advance the entire field. Her body lay open to the future; her survival would be a headline.

    The man watched with a peculiar intensity, not the anxious devotion of a husband, but the focused anticipation of someone waiting for a green light. He explained, almost casually, that once she was cured, he intended to meet his mistress at the beach. A public affair, he admitted, would be considered “unethical,” but surely—he reasoned—if his wife survived, the moral calculus would soften. One good outcome would offset the other. Balance restored.

    I stood there, staring at the screen. The broadcast cut between the operating table and a glowing chart tracking her biomarkers in real time—green lines twitching, rising, negotiating with fate. He leaned forward, eager, almost buoyant, rooting for her survival so he could proceed, unburdened, to his afternoon of betrayal.

    The room was quiet except for the hum of the television and, somewhere in the distance of my mind, the echo of that perfect car door closing—clean, decisive, final.

  • The G-Shock Multiband 6 Salvation Fantasy

    The G-Shock Multiband 6 Salvation Fantasy

    Pascal once observed that man cannot sit quietly in his room. Leave him alone with his thoughts and he begins to itch. Mortality looms. Meaning feels slippery. Silence becomes unbearable. So he reaches for distraction—baubles, upgrades, shiny mechanical companions that promise significance if only he can tighten one more screw or polish one more bezel.

    Call this Pascalian Gadget Panic: the modern expression of Pascal’s insight that when faced with the vague terror of existence, a man will anesthetize himself with objects. Radios. Cameras. Knives. Mechanical divers. G-Shocks. The object rotates through the years like a carousel horse, but the agitation underneath remains faithfully employed.

    Consider a suburban man in reasonably good health who nonetheless struggles with discipline, boundaries, and the mild chaos of his inner life. Spiritual philosophy eludes him. Self-knowledge feels slippery. Relationships are uneven terrain. Faced with this fog, he does what many modern men do.

    He buys toys.

    In his case, the toys are watches.

    For twenty years he labors happily in the vineyards of mechanical divers—Seikos mostly—fine steel contraptions that tick like tiny diesel engines beneath sapphire glass. The collection eventually reaches a comfortable plateau: curated, restrained, almost dignified.

    And then, inexplicably, he loses interest.

    The mechanical divers are quietly retired to their watch box like aging prizefighters. In their place emerges a new obsession: G-Shocks, but only of a very specific species—digital, solar-powered, atomic-synchronized, strapped in rubber armor like tiny tanks.

    Four commandments define the new religion:
    Tough Solar.
    Multiband 6 Atomic.
    Digital-only display.
    Rubber straps.

    One madness has been replaced with another, though the patient insists this is progress.

    To maintain psychological order, he compartmentalizes. The mechanical divers remain sealed in their box like museum artifacts. The G-Shocks, however, require their own ecosystem.

    Enter the Industrial Pipe Shrine.

    This object began life as a two-tier industrial pipe jewelry stand, the sort of thing normally used to hang headphones or necklaces. But in this household it has been promoted to sacred architecture. It sits reverently on a windowsill each night so the watches may commune with the atomic time signal emanating from Fort Collins, Colorado.

    To the uninitiated, it looks like plumbing hardware assembled by a bored welder.

    To the devotee, it is a receiving station of cosmic precision.

    Each night the G-Shocks dangle from the steel arms like metallic fruit awaiting revelation. Somewhere in Colorado a radio transmitter hums. Somewhere in the suburban night a man sleeps. And somewhere between them invisible time signals pass through drywall and glass until they arrive inside the tiny ferrite antenna hidden in a digital watch.

    When the signal locks in, the man experiences what can only be called the Multiband-6 Salvation Fantasy.

    For a brief moment the universe feels orderly. Accurate. Aligned. The watch has synchronized itself with atomic time. Solar cells sip daylight. Precision has been achieved.

    The feeling of control is intoxicating.

    Unfortunately, it lasts about as long as the next YouTube review.

    When members of the G-Shock community encounter this newly converted soul, they greet him with cheerful recognition.

    “Congratulations,” they say. “You’ve been G-Shocked.”

    The phrase functions like a baptism. The initiate is welcomed into a brotherhood of people who understand the deep satisfaction of armored watches, radio synchronization, and the quiet glow of solar charging indicators.

    At this moment the man realizes something unsettling: his geekdom has intensified

    Part of him embraces the absurdity. The watches are inexpensive. The hobby is harmless. Why not laugh at himself and enjoy the ride?

    But another part of him wonders whether something darker is unfolding.

    Is this, perhaps, the arrival of the Jungian Shadow—the neglected, obsessive part of the psyche now expressing itself through tactical wristwear?

    Will the Shadow politely stop at three G-Shocks?

    Or will it grow ambitious—multiplying into a monstrous collection that colonizes dresser drawers, nightstands, gym bags, glove compartments, and every horizontal surface in the home?

    Disturbed by these questions, the man attempts a strategic retreat. He throws himself into his other pursuits: bodybuilding, physical culture, literature, television, film.

    These distractions provide temporary relief.

    But the G-Shock Shadow is patient.

    Soon he is back on YouTube watching reviews of obscure Japanese models. He is compiling wish lists. He is studying signal reception strategies.

    Late at night he imagines the watches hanging from the steel arms of his T-bone pipe stand.

    And in darker moments he sees them differently.

    Not as tools.

    But as vampire bats—black, armored creatures dangling upside down, waiting for him to drift into sleep so they can descend silently and drink his blood.

    When he wakes in the morning, they will still be there on the windowsill.

    Perfectly synchronized.

    And waiting.

  • The Cure for Function Abandonment Syndrome

    The Cure for Function Abandonment Syndrome

    You encounter a Rangeman owner who worships the stealth blacked-out model with a devotion bordering on performance art. He will tell you, calmly and without irony, that he can’t actually read the time on the negative display. It doesn’t matter. The watch stays on the wrist because it looks lethal—pure shadow, pure attitude, pure presence. Time, apparently, is now a secondary feature.

    Think about the pivot this represents. The man did not buy a timepiece; he bought an image. The geometry, the matte darkness, the tactical aura—these are the real functions. The digits exist somewhere inside the case, like a ceremonial appendix. If the light is right and the wrist is angled just so, the hour may reveal itself. But that’s incidental. The watch is no longer consulted. It is displayed.

    He resembles the fellow who once insisted he read glossy magazines for the articles, only to admit later that the articles had become irrelevant long ago. Content is gone. Only the visuals remain. In the same way, this enthusiast has crossed the line from horology to aesthetic intoxication. The watch no longer tells time. It tells a story about the man wearing it.

    Such a man is suffering from Function Abandonment Syndrome—the condition that sets in when a watch enthusiast quietly releases the expectation that the watch perform its basic task and begins wearing it purely for appearance, mood, or identity. Legibility becomes optional. Accuracy becomes theoretical. The time is technically available somewhere—under ideal lighting, at a cooperative angle—but that’s no longer the point. The owner has crossed the invisible threshold where tool becomes sculpture and utility becomes a nostalgic rumor. He doesn’t check the watch anymore; he acknowledges it. Function Abandonment Syndrome is what happens when style overwhelms purpose and the job description is politely retired without ceremony.

    Is there a cure for his condition? Yes. Imagine this: He lives happily in the glow of his blacked-out Rangeman until the day function suddenly matters again. Picture this: he’s driving a lonely stretch of highway at dusk when the fuel light comes on and the next gas station is closing in five minutes. His phone is dead. The dashboard clock is gone. All he has is the watch he chose for its “presence.” He lifts his wrist. Tilts. Squints. Rolls it toward the fading light like a man trying to read smoke signals from the wrist. The digits hover there, shy and evasive, revealing nothing but his own poor life choices. The station lights flicker off in the distance. In that moment—heart rate climbing, range dropping, darkness settling—he experiences the cold, clarifying terror that ends Function Abandonment Syndrome forever. Because style is thrilling in the showroom. But when the world gets real, the most beautiful watch on earth is the one that will tell you the time the first time you ask.