Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Night My Biceps Filed for Divorce

    The Night My Biceps Filed for Divorce

    My pride as a lifelong bodybuilder—still clinging to relevance in my sixties—met its demise one evening on the couch, where I lay in a slovenly posture and glazed-over eyes while watching the movie Road House. Calling it a film feels charitable. It’s more like a glossy shrine to the male physique, starring a Jake Gyllenhaal so surgically chiseled he looks as if Michelangelo started carving David, lost patience, and decided to make him punch strangers for a living.

    Gyllenhaal plays a brooding bouncer in Key West, a man whose job description consists of protecting a bar and its luminous owner, played by Jessica Williams, from the usual parade of cinematic degenerates. This inevitably summons the film’s apex predator: Conor McGregor, who appears less like a human being and more like a shaved grizzly bear that discovered performance enhancers and never looked back. Veins bulge with the enthusiasm of overinflated garden hoses. His performance oscillates between feral animal and man who hasn’t blinked since the Obama administration, and it’s oddly mesmerizing.

    The plot is a rumor—thin, fleeting, and functionally irrelevant. A stranger rides into town, restores order with his fists, and exits in a cloud of testosterone and broken cartilage. But let’s not pretend narrative is the point. The camera worships muscle with the reverence of a Renaissance chapel. Biceps gleam. Lats ripple. Every slow-motion shot feels like a commercial for pre-workout powder and substances that come in unmarked vials. This isn’t storytelling; it’s a two-hour flex.

    Somewhere between Gyllenhaal’s forty-seventh shirtless entrance and McGregor’s latest snarl—delivered like a man hydrated exclusively by rage—I reached for my phone. Not to check the time. To search McGregor’s diet. Because this spectacle doesn’t entertain; it indicts. It shines a harsh fluorescent light on your own soft edges and whispers, You, sir, are a sentient pudding cup.

    At sixty-two, I knew I wasn’t about to carve myself into Gyllenhaal’s likeness. But I was still in the fight—kettlebells in the garage four days a week, the exercise bike on the others. My diet remained high-protein, though compromised by opportunistic snacking. The result: less Greek statue, more a compact, perspiring version of Larry Csonka in a Hawaiian shirt, lingering too long at the Grand Wailea buffet.

    I entertained fantasies of becoming a skinny version of myself. Replace kettlebells with yoga. Trade meat-heavy sandwiches for two plant-based meals a day of steel-cut oats, bell peppers, and tofu. But a chorus of old convictions intervened: maintain the protein intake, preserve the muscle, defend the territory. Five servings of “bioavailable protein” a day. No surrender. Somewhere along the way, fitness had ceased being about health and hardened into doctrine.

    I hadn’t competed since finishing runner-up in the 1981 Mr. Teenage San Francisco, but the mindset endured: life as contest, existence as proving ground. That belief wasn’t accidental. It was inherited. My father—infantryman turned engineer—treated life like a problem to be solved and a battle to be won.

    In the early 1960s, stationed in Anchorage, he found himself competing with another suitor—John Shalikashvili—for my mother’s affection. When Christmas interrupted the contest, my father refused the ceasefire. He cut his holiday short, intent on beating his rival back to Alaska. His vehicle—a pale 1959 Morris Minor—chose that moment to revolt, its fuel system failing with impeccable timing.

    Lesser men would have conceded. My father reached for ingenuity. Lacking a proper part, he improvised with a prophylactic and a paperclip, fashioning a grotesque but functional fix. It was absurd. It was desperate. It worked. He made it to Seattle, boarded the ferry, and arrived in Alaska forty-eight hours ahead of his rival.

    Nine months later, I entered the world—the byproduct of competitive instinct, mechanical improvisation, and what must surely be the most unorthodox application of latex in automotive history. In that moment, my father didn’t just win a race. He set a standard: adapt, outmaneuver, prevail. And decades later, as I sat watching sculpted demigods on screen, I realized that standard was still quietly running my life.

  • The Futility of Resisting Chronological Drift Syndrome

    The Futility of Resisting Chronological Drift Syndrome

    Eight years ago, at a funeral—an appropriate venue for truth disguised as humor—my cousin, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator, told me his greatest challenge in retirement was finding enough time to spend his money. It landed as a joke with a faint echo of confession. Back then, he was still visible—still a man whose time, opinions, and presence registered on the social radar.

    Now, in his mid-seventies, the joke has curdled. He tells me the most striking feature of aging is not pain, not decline, but disappearance. People look past him as if he were a smudge on the lens he once spent a career perfecting. He has entered Graylight Erasure: still present in the room, but no longer illuminated by attention, interest, or acknowledgment. The body remains; the spotlight moves on.

    I’ve tried to account for this vanishing act, and the first culprit is economic. Consumer culture is a young man’s game—desire, impulse, upgrade, repeat. When you fall out of that loop, you don’t just lose purchasing power; you lose narrative value. You become a spectator in a drama that no longer requires your participation. This is Market Exit Obsolescence: the quiet demotion that occurs when you age out of the demographic worth seducing. The ads stop speaking to you, and soon enough, so do people.

    The second cause is more primitive: denial. Aging is bad for morale. It interrupts the fantasy that time is generous and endings are negotiable. Youth is a fever dream in which mortality is a rumor; old age is the nutrition label you avoided reading—the one that ruins the snack. An older person carries inconvenient data: limits, deadlines, the unadvertised fine print of being alive. And no one likes a walking disclosure statement.

    So the culture develops a reflex. Call it the Mortality Contagion Effect—the quiet recoil from those who remind us, without trying, that the clock is not decorative. As if proximity might transmit the condition. As if attention were a kind of exposure.

    My cousin didn’t lose his competence, his intelligence, or his history. He lost his audience. And in a culture that equates attention with existence, that loss feels less like aging and more like erasure.

    Watching my cousin—healthy, financially well-off, and increasingly ignored—I see what aging really delivers: Chronological Drift Syndrome. It’s the moment you realize the culture has shifted into a higher gear while you’re still driving the same well-maintained car. The rhythms change, the references mutate, the priorities rebrand overnight, and suddenly you’re not wrong—you’re just out of sync. You haven’t stopped moving; the world has simply sped past you and called it progress.

    As you age, you may attempt to resist this growing misalignment with youth culture. You may try to make yourself youthful with potions, makeovers, and pharmaceuticals, but these measures will soon backfire. You will find that fighting Chronological Drift Syndrome is a bit like sprinting on a moving walkway that’s headed the other way—you burn calories, attract attention, and end up exactly where you started, only louder and slightly winded. The harder you try to keep up—deploying borrowed slang, auditioning for trends, nodding along to references you Googled ten minutes earlier—the more you resemble a man trying to crash a party he once hosted. 

    Desperation has a smell, and it pairs poorly with youth culture, which detects inauthenticity the way a smoke alarm detects toast. The irony is brutal: the effort to remain relevant is what renders you ridiculous. The more elegant move is to step off the conveyor, plant your feet, and accept the drift with a straight back and a sense of humor. Dignity, unlike trends, ages well.

  • The First Chapter That Ate Your Book

    The First Chapter That Ate Your Book

    You come to a conclusion that feels less like insight and more like a verdict: you don’t write books. You write beginnings. Your first chapters arrive with swagger—clean sentences, live current, the sense that something large and dangerous has finally found its voice. Then the voltage drops. Page by page, the prose flattens, the ideas thin, the attention frays. What started as a symphony becomes elevator music. The opening didn’t lie; it just spent the budget in the first scene.

    The problem has a name: First-Chapter Mirage—that narcotic flash of brilliance that convinces you endurance will follow. It doesn’t. You mistake ignition for engine. You draft again, and again, and again—thirty years of rehearsing the same disappointment with professional discipline. Each time the opening whispers, You’re a novelist. Each time the middle replies, You’re a sprinter.

    Eventually you stop arguing with physics. You pivot. No more epics, no more essays with spinal cords. You go small—epigrams, fragments, paragraphs cut to a bright edge. They accumulate like polished shells. Thread enough of them together and you can call it a “book,” the way a pukka shell necklace can pass for a coastline if you squint.

    But don’t flatter yourself. Pukka Shell Authorship has limits. It gives you sheen without sweep, intensity without architecture. It can gesture at argument but rarely sustain one; it can dazzle in the moment and leave no aftertaste of necessity. It is, at best, a collection that behaves like a book when the lights are low.

    So proceed—just not triumphantly. Write lapidary aphoristic paragraphs with care and the transitions with suspicion. Admit what the form can’t do. Let humility do the binding your structure won’t. If you’re going to string shells, at least know you’re not building a cathedral.

  • The Frogman and the Sandwich

    The Frogman and the Sandwich

    The Frogman is my aspirational self. He is courageous and disciplined. I am not. I am a coward. My self-recrimination is based on the fact that I allow fear to compromise my morals. For example, I am revolted by the way livestock is abused for our animal consumption so that philosophically I should not eat meat, eggs, or dairy, but I fear that a plant-based diet will not give me optimal nutrition. Nor will it quell my rapacious appetite, so I compromise my morals and “force myself” to eat steak, chicken, eggs, cottage cheese, and Greek yogurt. The Frogman is a man of conviction. He looks at a moral problem square in the face and behaves appropriately. Gluttony is not part of his lifestyle. My soul is tormented by my awareness of the Avatar Conscience Gap: the distance between one’s idealized self—disciplined, principled, unflinching—and one’s actual behavior under pressure. The wider the gap, the louder the internal indictment, as the imagined avatar (in my case, the Frogman) functions as a constant moral comparator. My Frogman sits on my wrist, silent, resin-clad, a metronome of judgment. I measure myself against him and come up short in ways that feel precise, almost clinical. 

    Which brings us to actual clinical measurements.

    My doctor wants bloodwork—the full audit: PSA, lipids, liver function, hemoglobin. A bureaucratic harvest of numbers designed to convert my bloodstream into a spreadsheet. I concede the PSA. The rest feels like theater. At 230 pounds—twenty over my preferred fiction—my numbers will behave, mostly. LDL will be slightly elevated, the biochemical equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Twenty extra pounds leaves fingerprints. It always does.

    At 210, those fingerprints disappear. At 210, my labs don’t just improve—they absolve. At 210, I become the Frogman, at least on paper. A man whose blood tells a cleaner story.

    But I don’t need a blood test to tell me what to do. I need to lose twenty pounds. And I will be told this, formally, in a tone of gentle inevitability. A “plan of action,” as if the problem were logistical rather than existential.

    I cannot promise compliance.

    I eat well. Whole foods. High protein. I abstain from alcohol. I perform all the rituals of discipline. And yet my appetite behaves like an unlicensed contractor—loud, insistent, unconcerned with permits or plans.

    Last night, after dinner, I swore the kitchen closed at six. A solemn vow, made with the confidence of a man who has not yet opened a lunch bag.

    Then I found it: an uneaten turkey and cheese sandwich in my daughter’s bag. Soft bread. Mild cheese. The faint scent of opportunity.

    There was no debate. No internal summit. I ate it immediately, gratefully, with the kind of focus normally reserved for religious experience. It was, without exaggeration, the best moment of my day.

    This is Sandwich Serendipity—the ecstatic discovery of unclaimed food, experienced not as leftovers but as providence. The afflicted man does not assess freshness, provenance, or caloric cost. He does not negotiate with tomorrow’s intentions. He receives the sandwich as a gift from the universe and responds with immediate devotion.

    You can moralize this if you like. I won’t. The joy is too pure.

    But it does raise an inconvenient question: how does a man like this—susceptible to ambush by deli meat and porridge bread—promise a physician that he will lose twenty pounds? On what authority? On which version of himself?

    Because the Frogman would not have eaten that sandwich.

    The Frogman would have zipped the bag, closed the kitchen, and gone to bed with the calm of a man aligned with his values. The Frogman does not forage. He does not improvise. He does not surrender.

    I put the watch on anyway.

    It sits on my wrist like a massive, indestructible accusation—resin, digital, exact. It broadcasts courage. It implies discipline. It suggests a man who has made his decisions and is living inside them.

    And beneath it, quietly, is the truth:

    I am not that man.

    Not yet.

  • The Frogman Won’t Let the World Forget Me

    The Frogman Won’t Let the World Forget Me

    No one pulls you aside and says it plainly, so you discover it the hard way: approaching your mid-sixties is not a dignified procession but a slow-motion loss of fluency. Not in language—you still speak English—but in the dialect of the present. You drop references like breadcrumbs—Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, All in the Family—and watch them land with the soft thud of irrelevance. Blank faces greet you like unresponsive kiosks. You begin to understand that your cultural currency has been quietly demonetized.

    The misalignment spreads. You assume appliances are built with the stubborn dignity of the past, only to discover they’re engineered like disposable cutlery. You touch them wrong and they sulk; you look at them sternly and they fracture. Somewhere along the way, durability became a nostalgic rumor.

    Then the body joins the conspiracy. You can ingest oceans of omega-3s, lecture yourself about triglycerides, and still your short-term memory leaks like a cracked vessel. You misplace socks—on the couch. You forget the final episode of the crime series you were definitely going to finish. You overlook the Costco-sized battalion of trash bags stationed in the garage. You grind tomorrow’s coffee beans and wake up convinced you didn’t. Each lapse is trivial; together they assemble a quiet indictment. The evidence accumulates like unopened mail—thick, accusatory, impossible to ignore.

    At some point you recognize the composite image: a man slightly out of phase with the world, blinking as if the lighting has changed without notice. You flash your senior discount at the box office with a strange mix of pride and disbelief, like a badge you didn’t apply for but now must wear.

    Of course, you resist. You lift. You count protein with monastic zeal—two hundred grams a day, as if amino acids can negotiate with time. You clang kettlebells in the garage and polish your physique into a version that might pass for forty-four under forgiving conditions. It’s a valiant performance—convincing in daylight, flattering in mirrors.

    Then night driving happens.

    Depth perception turns traitor. Headlights arrive as surgical instruments. Streetlamps slice into your retinas with the precision of interrogation. The illusion collapses in a single commute. Biology, unimpressed by your discipline, resumes control of the narrative.

    And so you become, whether you like it or not, a public artifact of time passing—a walking reminder to the young that the clock is not theoretical. To them, you are the human equivalent of a neighbor’s dog barking at six in the morning: persistent, a little unnerving, impossible to mute. You do not mean to be instructive, but you are.

    Faced with this, I did what any reasonable man would do: I recruited a muse. The narrator of “Deacon Blues”—that suburban alchemist who turns disappointment into velvet—became my companion. I gave him a name, because a man like that demands one: Deacon. Each night he reinvents himself as a nocturnal artist, steeped in jazz and whiskey, sustained by the elegance of his own delusions.

    I don’t drink. I don’t haunt smoky rooms. My vice is different, and it is, in its own way, just as theatrical. I cosplay.

    My chosen persona is Action Man—the British cousin of G.I. Joe, the hero of my childhood in Nairobi, where toy stores stocked imperial variations of American fantasies. In those days, I directed epics in the backyard. I rigged a clothes hanger to a fishing line strung between trees and sent my plastic hero ziplining into danger, rescuing hostages from villains who existed only because I needed them to. The yard teemed with chameleons and carpenter bees; it might as well have been a jungle. I was the director, the stunt coordinator, the audience. Action Man never hesitated. Action Man did not forget where he put his socks.

    Now I find myself wondering whether my recent conversion to the G-Shock Frogman is less a purchase than a recall notice from that earlier life. A resin watch, oversized and unapologetic, arrives like a toy that learned how to tell time with atomic authority. Five hundred dollars for a device that looks like it escaped a childhood—but feels, on the wrist, like a command.

    The timing is suspicious. Irrelevance looms. Retirement whispers. The culture shrugs. And my unconscious, unimpressed by all of it, reaches backward and drags something forward. I did not want to dim. I wanted ignition. I wanted to be in my prime, or at least in the vicinity of it. I wanted, absurdly and sincerely, to be a man of action.

    So here I am, somewhere between Deacon’s barstool and a backyard zipline, imagining a descent into danger, hostages to save, a purpose that announces itself clearly and requires no explanation. The ravine is imaginary. The urgency is not.

  • From Analog Watch Devotee to Digital Convert

    From Analog Watch Devotee to Digital Convert

    For decades I carried a tidy prejudice: digital time was vulgar—soulless, phone-adjacent, a betrayal of my analog faith. I was a man of brushed steel and sweeping seconds, a parishioner in the Church of the Diver. Quartz was for commuters. Resin was for children.

    Then I strapped on the G‑Shock Frogman and looked down.

    The numbers were unapologetic—big, bright, exact. No squinting, no interpretive dance with minute hands. Just time, delivered with atomic certainty. It wasn’t charming. It was correct. And I found myself loving it in the way you love a tool that does not negotiate.

    The comparison arrived uninvited: the muscle cars of my youth—Mustangs, Barracudas—beautiful, yes, but also squeaking relics with climate control that felt like a rumor. You don’t drive them so much as you endure them. Then you slide into a modern car and the world seals itself around you—quiet, precise, obedient. That’s what the Frogman felt like. I hadn’t upgraded my watch; I had defected to a better century.

    Here’s the heresy: I now resent my analog watches. I resent the squint, the guesswork, the artisanal inaccuracy sold at luxury prices. Why, exactly, is it acceptable that a watch costing thousands loses minutes while this rubberized amphibian syncs itself with the sky?

    I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I no longer pretend to be in charge of it. What I do know is this: the Frogman isn’t leaving my wrist.

    Colleagues of the watch faith, witness a Tribal Migration Event: the moment a collector crosses a border he swore was permanent—mechanical to quartz, analog to digital—and discovers he prefers the other side. It begins as a fling, a novelty purchase, a “let’s see.” It ends as a relocation. The shock is not the watch; it’s the realization that your identity was a costume with good lighting.

    The casualties are lined up in a box. My high-end Seiko divers—polished, dignified, expensively nostalgic—sit like former lovers who’ve been ghosted without explanation.

    “How could you?” they seem to ask.

    “You’re dead to me,” I reply, with a briskness that surprises us all.

    At this point the relationship is no longer metaphorical. It has crossed into the psychological, possibly the spiritual. There may be paperwork.

    Let me concede the obvious: on a man my age, the Frogman is not flattering. It doesn’t whisper style; it shouts evidence. It looks like something a concerned relative might mention to a professional. And yet—there it remains, immovable.

    Because something happened.

    Not a gentle drift. Not a tasteful adjustment.

    A break.

    I felt it first in small betrayals of habit. My appetite tightened its belt. Three meals, no raids. No twilight foraging expeditions in the kitchen under the pretense of “just checking.” Focus sharpened. Discipline, that elusive houseguest, unpacked its bags.

    Then the house itself changed.

    No announcements were made, but the atmosphere shifted. The eye-rolling ceased. The quiet demotion—from patriarch to eccentric roommate—reversed itself without ceremony. I had, somehow, acquired gravity. Decisions began to look like decisions rather than impulses in costume.

    And then—this is the part that refuses explanation—my nightmares stopped.

    Not improved. Not reduced.

    Stopped.

    For years they ran nightly, a private cinema of dread with excellent attendance. Then the Frogman arrived and the theater closed. Lights out. Eviction. Now I sleep. I dream in color. I jog through fields of berries and, in a voice suspiciously like John Lennon, I sing, “I am the Frogman.”

    Explain that.

    A resin watch—battery, rubber strap, digital readout—accomplished what therapy, discipline, and time politely declined to do. Part of me wants to accept the miracle without inquiry. When something rescues you from overeating, ridicule, and nocturnal terror, you don’t interrogate it. You nod. You say thank you. You keep the artifact close and your questions at a respectful distance.

    If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
    If you don’t understand the blessing, don’t analyze it.

    Unfortunately, I’m not built for reverence without curiosity. I want mechanisms. I want causes. I want a diagram that explains how a mass-produced object rewired my habits, upgraded my household rank, and shut down my night terrors like a switch.

    That investigation is what lies ahead—the study of what I can only call the Frogman Elixir Effect: a transformation so complete the purchaser no longer quite exists.

    I am not wearing the watch.

    The watch is wearing me. I am the Frogman.

    The migration is complete.

  • Sandwich Serendipity and the Futility of Bloodwork

    Sandwich Serendipity and the Futility of Bloodwork

    My doctor wants bloodwork—a full panel: PSA, lipids, liver function, hemoglobin—the entire bureaucratic inquisition, designed to convert my bloodstream into a tidy Excel file. I concede the PSA; no one wants to play roulette with prostate cancer. But the rest feels like an elaborate confirmation of what I already know. At 230 pounds—twenty over my fighting weight—my numbers will behave themselves, with the lone exception of LDL, which will arrive slightly smug and slightly elevated. Twenty extra pounds always leaves a trace, like fingerprints at a low-stakes crime scene. At 210, those same labs would glow with moral rectitude, the biochemical equivalent of a pressed shirt and a firm handshake.

    What I need is not diagnostics but discipline. The blood test will not reveal anything that a mirror and a waistband haven’t already disclosed. When the results come back, I’ll receive the ritual “plan of action,” translated from medical into plain English: lose twenty pounds. A reasonable directive. Also a promise I cannot make. I eat clean. I eat whole foods. I load up on protein. I’ve exiled alcohol. None of it matters. My appetite has the temperament of a teenager in shoulder pads, pacing the sidelines and waiting for the next snap.

    Spare me the reminder that I’m approaching sixty-five. My hunger did not get the memo. Last night, after dinner, after I had sworn a blood oath to stop eating at six, I began clearing out my daughter’s lunch bag and discovered it: an untouched turkey and cheese sandwich, wrapped in quiet indifference. There was no debate, no moral tribunal. I ate it immediately, reverently, savoring the soft, faintly sweet Trader Joe’s porridge bread as if it had been prepared for me by a benevolent deity with a sense of humor. It was, without exaggeration, the best moment of my day.

    You can dress this up as weakness, but that misses the phenomenon. This is Sandwich Serendipity—the electric, unearned joy of finding an uneaten sandwich where none should exist. It is not leftovers; it is treasure. It is the culinary equivalent of discovering cash in an old jacket or rubbing a lamp and having lunch appear. The afflicted man does not pause to assess freshness, provenance, or caloric impact. He does not negotiate with his better angels. He consumes. The sandwich is accepted as a gift from the universe, a brief amnesty from restraint, a shining interruption in an otherwise disciplined life.

    This is the man sitting across from the doctor, nodding politely at the mention of triglycerides and lifestyle modification. This is the man being asked to promise weight loss. And the honest answer—the only answer worth giving—is this: I will try. But somewhere, in some forgotten lunch bag, a sandwich is waiting. And when it calls, I will answer.

  • 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.

  • My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

    My Life, Annotated; My Dinner, Missing

    Last night I dreamed I was back in a college dorm, the kind that confuses scarcity with philosophy. The place ran on grievance and empty shelves. The communal kitchen looked like it had been looted by graduate students—half a bottle of soy sauce, a fossilized lime, and the lingering odor of arguments. The factions were loud, doctrinaire, and permanently aggrieved; the refrigerator was quiet and permanently bare. I kept my mouth shut. Hunger is easier to manage than other people’s ideologies.

    A short walk away—dream geography is generous like that—sat my mother’s second husband, Baron, who has been dead since 2018 and therefore was very much alive. He wore a white football jersey and the expression of a man auditing eternity. He’d set up on a patio with a notebook and a stack of my YouTube videos, which he was mining for a college project. The topic: my life, the false stories I’ve told about it, the false stories about those false stories, and the small industry I’ve built turning all of it into myth. He watched, paused, rewound, took notes with clerical devotion. It was flattering in the way a tax audit is flattering.

    Part of me admired the rigor. Another part of me bristled at the freeloading. There he was, piggybacking on my past like it was a group project I didn’t sign up for. Still, the man was thorough. He unearthed old footage, journals, drawings—artifacts I’d misfiled in the archive of things I no longer had the energy to remember. If diligence were destiny, he was on his way to a summa.

    I wished him luck and went back to the kitchen, where luck goes to die. As I left, Baron called out that he’d put a beige bowl of hard-boiled eggs on the top shelf of the fridge. Help yourself. The promise of protein felt like a minor miracle. I elbowed through the crowd—everyone arguing, no one eating—opened the door, and there it was: the beige bowl, perfectly placed, impeccably empty. The eggs had been converted into theory.

    So I stood there, starving, while somewhere behind me my life was being reduced to footnotes. In the dream, as in the waking world, the analysis was abundant. The food was not.

  • The Travails of Horological Identity Drift

    The Travails of Horological Identity Drift

    To have a hobby is to cultivate an identity. The longer you grow in the hobby, the more you learn about yourself, your likes, dislikes, and inclinations. If you’re a watch collector, as I am, you gravitate to certain types of watches and retreat from others. You cannot explain your inclinations. When fellow watch collectors notice you share a proclivity for a type of watch, there is both a bond and a fellowship. When the fellow watch collectors notice your tastes clash with theirs, disappointment and even hurt feelings can ensue. Within the larger watch hobby, there are subcategories, where collectors branch off and form tight alliances, tribes, and deeply-forged bonds. A sense of loyalty ensues. We call this Taste Tribalism: the formation of tight-knit subgroups within a hobby, bound not by logic but by shared aesthetic instincts. These tribes generate loyalty, belonging, and, when challenged, a surprising capacity for disappointment.

    Woe, however, to the watch collector who, for reasons he can’t explain, departs from what was once his favorite watch type and ventures into fresh waters. Such a transition can bring disorientation and confusion. To abandon one watch category and embrace another creates what is called Horological Identity Drift: the slow, almost imperceptible shift in a collector’s taste in which objects once central to identity begin to feel like artifacts from a previous self. The watches haven’t changed; the wearer has. What once signaled meaning now feels like a costume left over from a role no longer being played.

    While this new adventure from “watch drift” gives fresh blood to his hobby, it leaves his fellow collectors feeling betrayed and abandoned. What offends them is their sense of Aesthetic Apostasy: the moment a collector abandons a once-defining preference—crossing from one horological faith to another—provoking confusion, quiet resentment, and the sense that something sacred has been violated.

    In my case, the “drift” occurred two months ago when I started wearing G-Shocks at the exclusion of my Seiko divers. I did all I could do to return to my mechanicals, including the act of putting steel bracelets on them, in the hope that giving them a luxury look would make them more appealing, but this measure failed. The Seiko divers remain in the box, largely unworn. As a result, I am a watch drifter. 

    What does this “drifting” collector do? Retreat to his old watch type and return to his fellow collectors? What folly. He would simply be betraying himself to please others. Such an act would be a violation of a hobby that brought him joy and authenticity. He must therefore let his true tastes govern his watch journey and the desire to please others take a back seat. Otherwise, his hobby will be a superficial affair, a desperate act to belong while his authentic self withers on the vine.