Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • When Loving Watches Starts to Feel Like a Job

    When Loving Watches Starts to Feel Like a Job

    In her darkly hilarious comedy special Father, Atsuko Okatsuka shares the origin story of her career in punchlines. Her schizophrenic mother once “kidnapped” her in Japan and whisked her away to the United States without warning, severing her ties to her father in the process. The trauma was so disorienting, so profound, that Atsuko now mines laughter for survival. She tells us, with a comedian’s grin and a survivor’s twitch, that she performs to fill an infinite hole in her soul with the validation of strangers.

    That hole is not unique to her. It’s a universal pit—bottomless and demanding. Validation comes in many flavors. For some, it’s esteem and admiration. For others, it’s expertise, artistry, the warm glow of audience approval. For Atsuko, it’s laughter. For others, it’s the faint buzz of a “like” on a post about a wristwatch.

    Let us now consider the watch obsessive, a different breed of relevance-seeker, but a kindred spirit nonetheless. He isn’t doing five-minute sets at the Laugh Factory, but he is performing—on Instagram, on forums, on YouTube, in the comment sections of strangers’ macro shots. He presents his taste, his “knowledge,” his ever-shifting collection. But underneath the sapphire crystals and brushed titanium is the same primal whisper:
    Do I still matter?
     Do they still see me?

    Here’s the tragic twist: he may already have the perfect collection. It gives him joy. It’s balanced. It fits in a single watch box. By all logic, he should stop. Buying another watch would be like adding a fifth leg to a table—wobbly and unnecessary. But he doesn’t stop. He can’t stop.

    Why? Because if he stops collecting, he stops posting. If he stops posting, he stops being seen. And in a world addicted to scrolling, disappearing feels like dying.

    Relevance is the new oxygen. And social media is a machine that runs on novelty, not legacy. The digital hive forgets fast. “Gangnam Style” is now a fossil. “Call Me Maybe” is background noise at the grocery store. To stay visible, you must be new. You must be shiny. You must offer dopamine.

    And what happens when the watch addict manages his demons, reaches peace, and stops feeding the machine?

    He becomes boring. He becomes silent. He becomes irrelevant.

    And the parasocial bonds he once had—those illusory friendships, those mutual obsessions—fade. The sense of exile is real. It doesn’t matter that the exile is self-imposed. The pain still lingers.

    That fear—that primordial fear of irrelevance, of being cast out from the tribe—can be so powerful it masquerades as passion. It convinces the watch obsessive to keep flipping, keep chasing, keep posting. Not out of love, but out of fear.

    In this crazed state, the obsessive has succumbed to Performative Collecting–the transformation of a private pleasure into a public act staged for recognition. Watches are curated less for personal resonance than for their ability to sustain audience attention. Silence is interpreted as failure.

    So the question becomes: Are we collectors? Or are we hostages? Do we love horology? Or are we simply terrified of vanishing?

  • When Your Bodybuilding Past Still Haunts You

    When Your Bodybuilding Past Still Haunts You

    Last night I dreamed I was illegally transporting a piano.

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

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

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

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

    Then I saw it.

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

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

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

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

    They refused to listen.

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

  • When a Strap Solved Everything—and Instagram Ruined It

    When a Strap Solved Everything—and Instagram Ruined It

    I don’t work for Divecore straps. I don’t have an affiliate link. I don’t even remember how I found them. They just appeared one day, like a cult recruiter with good posture. All I know is this: once I tried them, something clicked. The fit was right. The comfort was immediate. The look was honest. So I did what any rational watch obsessive does when he thinks he’s reached enlightenment—I stripped every watch off its bracelet, slapped on black or orange FKM Divecore straps, and declared myself finished.

    Done.
    Happy.
    At ease.

    That phrase—at ease—matters. A seven-watch collection, unified by one strap philosophy, felt merciful. There was no mental juggling, no wrist gouging from metal end links, no micro-adjustment rituals to accommodate the daily swelling and shrinking of my aging, temperamental wrist. The system was clean. Elegant. Humane. For once, the hobby felt like a hobby instead of a low-grade engineering problem.

    Then, in August of 2025, Instagram did what Instagram does best: it ruined my peace. Someone informed me—solemnly, heroically—that a study had been released about FKM straps and PFAS “forever chemicals.” The straps in the study were abused like props in a MythBusters episode—conditions so extreme they bore little resemblance to actual wrist life—but still. With plastic contamination already saturating the planet, did I really need to marinate my arteries in additional synthetic mystery?

    So off came the FKM. On went the “safe” alternatives: urethane, silicone, vulcanized rubber. They were… fine. Adequate. Technically acceptable. Emotionally inert. I wore them the way you eat airline chicken—without complaint, but without love. And yes, I feel compelled to say it again: I still don’t work for Divecore.

    Feeling vaguely bereaved, I did what many men do when they sense disorder: I tried to impose balance. I put stainless steel bracelets back on some heavy hitters. I even bought a gunmetal, monochromatic dive watch on a bracelet, as if symmetry itself could rescue me. I now had four watches on straps and four on bracelets. The collection looked fantastic. Museum-worthy. Spreadsheet-perfect.

    And yet—I was less happy.

    That’s when I recognized the familiar enemy: Cognitive Load Creep. The slow, insidious return of mental fatigue as the collection grows more complex. Straps versus bracelets. Balance logic. Adjustment rituals. The hobby quietly mutates into unpaid systems management. Every glance at the watch box now came with a background hum of decision-making. And whenever that hum gets loud enough, a voice appears.

    You lost the plot.

    And it’s right.

    The plot was never variety.
    The plot was never balance.
    The plot was happiness.

    Happiness, in the watch hobby, is hard to define—but it’s easy to identify its opposites: stress, obsession, second-guessing, wheel-spinning, FOMO anxiety, mental overload, and the constant sense that you’ve taken on more than you can metabolize. If your watches feel like a to-do list, something has gone wrong.

    I’m trying to learn from this chapter. I know, intellectually, that less really is more. I know stress is poison. I also know I have a flair for melodrama. I can turn a strap swap into a Greek tragedy. I pine. I brood. I catastrophize like an adolescent waiting for a love note reply that never comes. It’s embarrassing. It’s funny. And I’m certain I’m not alone. Watch people are wired this way—OCD-prone, sentimentally overloaded, forever narrating their own inner turmoil.

    So what’s next?

    I don’t know. There’s no blueprint. No masterplan. No illuminated exit sign pointing toward Horological Sanity. The best I can do is remain watch-agnostic, laugh at my own compulsions, and tell the truth about whatever move I make next—if I make one at all.

    The world, I assure you, is not holding its breath.

    But a fellow watch obsessive might be.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    When I woke, the meeting was still going on.

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

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

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

    The song.
    The band.

    Gone.

  • The Watch Miserabilist

    The Watch Miserabilist

    The Watch Miserabilist is a man determined—by temperament, guilt, vanity, and a punishing inner prosecutor—to turn a pleasurable hobby into a moral catastrophe. He stares at his collection as if it were evidence in a trial against him and sighs, “These watches mock me. I am unworthy. I have nowhere to wear them.” He glances down at his Omega Planet Ocean while seated in a windowless man cave and concludes, with theatrical despair, that the watch has exposed him as a fraud. Luxury, in his hands, becomes an accusation.

    He shuffles around his lair like a contemporary Gollum: threadbare robe, bloodshot eyes, four-day beard, posture of defeat. He looks vaguely unhoused. The contrast is brutal—this exhausted homunculus lugging around a six-thousand-dollar slab of Swiss engineering on his wrist. The watch gleams with purpose; the man does not. You can practically hear the object wondering how it ended up here. Whatever redemption the Miserabilist hoped the purchase would bring has failed spectacularly. The watch did not save him. It only sharpened the irony.

    Despite owning a dozen coveted Swiss watches, his YouTube channel limps along with fewer than fifty subscribers. His voice is saturated with despair—thick, damp, unventilated. Viewers last about five seconds before clicking away, not because the watch isn’t beautiful, but because the misery is suffocating. The sadness radiates through the screen. You can almost smell the robe. No lume shot can redeem a tone that sounds like it’s been steeped overnight in self-loathing.

    The uncomfortable truth is that every watch obsessive carries a trace of the Watch Miserabilist within. It’s the voice of guilt and nihilism that wants to poison enjoyment, to insist that pleasure is illegitimate, that beauty must be justified, that desire is suspect. This voice must be acknowledged—but never indulged. You laugh at it. You recognize it. You keep it at arm’s length. Because once coddled, it metastasizes. The Watch Miserabilist is not wisdom. It is a disease, and left unchecked, it will devour every ounce of joy in its path.

  • The Exit Watch That Blew the Exit

    The Exit Watch That Blew the Exit

    There comes a moment in every watch influencer’s career when he announces, with ceremonial gravity, that he has found his Exit Watch. This watch, he assures his audience, is different. It stands apart from the rest of the collection not merely in design, but in destiny. It promises completion. Closure. A sense that the long pilgrimage through steel and lume has reached its ordained end.

    The watch is so magnificent that it demands narrative consequences. The influencer hints at “big changes.” New content. A reimagined channel. Perhaps fewer uploads, perhaps deeper reflections. The implication is clear: the Exit Watch has not merely ended a collecting phase—it has matured the man.

    Then the watch arrives.

    It is flawless. Better than expected. The case sings. The dial radiates authority. The bracelet feels engineered by monks. The unboxing video trembles with reverence. For approximately forty-eight hours, the influencer experiences peace.

    Then something goes wrong.

    The watch does not quiet desire. It amplifies it. Instead of satiation, there is hunger—acute, feral, unprecedented. The Exit Watch behaves less like a sedative and more like a stimulant. New watches begin to haunt his thoughts. He starts browsing late at night. He rationalizes. He reopens tabs he swore were closed forever. The collection multiplies wildly, untethered from logic or restraint.

    Within months, the spiral is complete. The influencer is on the brink of losing his sanity, his marriage, and his house—saved only by a merciful uncle who wires sixty thousand dollars to send him to a rehab facility in the Utah desert. There, stripped of his collection, he learns to play the flute, hunt his own food, and live without Wi-Fi. He emerges thinner, quieter, and reconciled to a solitary G-Shock Frogman, worn not for pleasure but for survival.

    This is Exit Watch Reversal: the affliction in which a watch intended to conclude a collecting arc instead detonates it. The subject does not experience closure, but acceleration—as though the watch has unlocked a previously dormant appetite and handed it the keys.

  • Applause Collapse and the Perils of a “New Direction”

    Applause Collapse and the Perils of a “New Direction”

    There comes a moment in every watch influencer’s career when he believes—sincerely, even nobly—that his audience is ready to applaud his growth. He has done the hard work. He has pared down. He has purified. Five watches remain, all on straps, each presented as evidence of restraint and moral clarity. The comments are approving. The tone is reverent. He is, at last, becoming free.

    Naturally, this serenity bores him.

    So he shakes things up. Three new watches enter the fold. The collection now stands at eight—four on straps, four on bracelets—symmetry restored, balance achieved. He announces a “new direction.” He films a YouTube video about his “evolving philosophy.” He speaks earnestly of equilibrium, versatility, and personal growth. The framing is careful. The lighting is soft. The music is tasteful. He waits for the applause.

    It does not come.

    Instead, the comment section turns cold. The audience, once indulgent, becomes prosecutorial. I thought you were healing. This feels like relapse. You were doing so well at five. The verdict is unanimous and devastating: the addiction has returned. What’s worse is not the criticism itself, but its accuracy. The influencer feels it immediately, like a clean punch to the ribs. The comments articulate the doubt he was trying not to hear.

    Shame sets in. He replays the video and cringes at his own rhetoric. “Quest for balance” now sounds like a euphemism. The watches feel heavier on the wrist. Within weeks, he detonates the entire enterprise. Seven watches are given away. One remains, kept on a strap, stripped of pleasure and worn more as a reminder than an object of joy. He deletes his YouTube channel. He nukes Instagram. He earns a kettlebell certification. He eats clean. He helps clients. He speaks of social media with quiet contempt, like someone describing a former addiction he has sworn never to touch again.

    This is Applause Collapse: the moment an influencer unveils a carefully staged transformation, expecting affirmation, only to encounter moral disappointment so severe that disappearance feels like the only honest response. It is not the loss of praise that breaks him. It is the realization that the crowd was not watching his journey—they were auditing his compliance.

  • Writing the Book That No One Can Ignore

    Writing the Book That No One Can Ignore

    You don’t sit down to write a book the world wants to read by accident. At least, it feels like an act of will. You force yourself into the chair. You produce sentences. You assemble a manuscript that lodges itself in people’s heads, agitates their assumptions, rearranges their furniture. The book exerts power—but not the vulgar kind. You’re not trying to dominate anyone. You’re simply telling the truth so cleanly, so directly, that looking away becomes impossible. Your ideas don’t shout. They persist. They refuse to be ignored.

    This kind of book is not a lecture, a scolding, or a manifesto. It doesn’t traffic in nihilism, misanthropy, or fashionable despair. It doesn’t prescribe easy solutions or luxuriate in outrage. Instead, it diagnoses. And a real diagnosis cuts both ways: it is unsparing about the human predicament while still pointing—quietly but unmistakably—toward an exit. Not optimism. Orientation.

    The book earns its authority by puncturing the clichés we treat as wisdom. It exposes the mass hallucinations surrounding happiness, success, fulfillment—all the shiny quests we pursue with religious devotion and predictable disappointment. But it does this without contempt. The tone isn’t superior; it’s exact. The pleasure of reading comes from recognition, not humiliation. You feel seen, not scolded.

    The sentences do the heavy lifting. They are short, fearless, and unembarrassed by clarity. There is no ornamental fog, no academic hedging, no decorative complexity masquerading as depth. Flowery prose and pretentious diction are weeds on a neglected lawn: they obscure what matters. This language is honed, not arid. It glints. Each sentence lands cleanly and moves on.

    If a curmudgeonly edge appears, it’s a seasoning, not the main course. A book powered by pure crankiness curdles into nihilism—and nihilism is dull. It flattens stakes, erases texture, and mistakes exhaustion for insight. This book avoids that trap. It remains alive to nuance, contradiction, and consequence.

    Because the book is so bracingly clear, other writers feel it immediately. Not admiration first—envy. The good kind. The Beatles hearing Pet Sounds and realizing the bar has been raised. The book doesn’t just succeed; it rearranges the landscape.

    What ultimately distinguishes it isn’t the subject matter but the voice. To understand that voice, Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom is instructive. Carrère contrasts the florid ambition of Luke—his PR-friendly, overworked prose—with the sayings of Jesus, which arrive stripped, terse, and destabilizing. Jesus’ words feel both utterly familiar and entirely unprecedented. Carrère calls this a linguistic hapax legomenon: a way of speaking so singular that it leaves no doubt a real person once spoke this way.

    That is the essence of a world-changing book. Its language has no template. It cannot be reverse-engineered or taught. It doesn’t sound like anything else. It lands in the reader’s mind with a depth that imitation can’t reach. At that point, the writer looks less like a craftsman and more like an oracle—someone through whom something passes.

    Which brings us back to will. Maybe writing such a book isn’t an act of will at all. Maybe the writer is chosen—by temperament, by obsession, by affliction—to speak this way. Either way, the true desire isn’t fame or money or validation. It’s to produce language with the force of a hapax legomenon: words that could only be said once, and yet echo forever.

    That, finally, is its own reward.

  • Gunmetal, DLC, and the Case Against Babying a Watch

    Gunmetal, DLC, and the Case Against Babying a Watch

    If you’re a watch collector, you’ve probably flirted with the idea of a black watch. At some point, the monochrome seduction gets you. A black case on a matching bracelet has a severity to it—stealthy, self-contained, faintly militant. I’ve fallen for it more than once. I’ve owned some genuinely beautiful black watches.

    I no longer own any of them.

    Such is life in the fever swamp of watch addiction, where flipping is not a behavior but a temperament. Watches arrive. Watches depart. Attachments form briefly and dissolve without ceremony.

    Take me back to around 2012. I owned two PVD-coated Seiko kinetic divers: the SUN007 and the SKA427P1. They were handsome, purposeful, and—contrary to every online hand-wringing session about coatings—remarkably resilient. I never scratched them. Not once. And yet they’re gone, casualties of some forgotten bout of restless dissatisfaction.

    Here’s the dangerous part: you can still find them brand new on eBay. I know this because I went looking. The prices are tempting. I felt the familiar tightening in the chest as I typed the model numbers. Relapse always begins with “just checking.”

    Another repeat offender from my past was the Citizen Promaster Sky BY0084-56E. I owned that watch no fewer than seven times over a decade. That’s not ownership—that’s a custody arrangement. Unlike PVD, the Citizen used Super Titanium treated with Duratect—often described as DLC. Marketing aside, the material difference is real. Stainless steel sits around 200 on the Vickers hardness scale. DLC-coated Super Titanium pushes north of 1,000. That’s not invincible, but it’s not cosplay either.

    In real life, that translates to this: the clasp will show desk-diver scuffs, because clasps always do. The rest of the watch? It shrugs off normal wear with indifference.

    Which brings me to the present. In a couple of days, the Citizen Super Titanium Gunmetal Diver NB6025-59H will return to my collection. Its DLC coating reads more dark gray than true black—an advantage, frankly. I plan to take it traveling. Miami. Hawaii. Heat. Salt water. Airport bins. Sunscreen. Sweat. This watch is not entering witness protection. It’s not being boxed, babied, or preserved for a future auction. It’s being worn.

    I’m glad to have one black—or gunmetal—watch in the rotation. It’s a welcome disruption from stainless steel, a visual reset. But there’s a caveat worth stating. Black watches are all about proximity. Up close, the details are rich and seductive. From a distance, they collapse into silhouette—lume floating in darkness. If you need your watch to announce itself across a room, black may frustrate you.

    For me, that quiet severity is the point.

  • The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

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

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

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

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

    The most embarrassing part is that I once returned it.

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

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

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

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