Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s freshly minted Enshittification. Early on, he revisits Facebook circa 2010: the honey pot that lured billions before curdling into a slurry of compulsion loops, conspiracy gristle, and industrial-scale data mining. It’s sharp, it’s punchy—and it gave me déjà vu. Then my stomach dropped: I like the coinage, I like the thesis that we’re living through the Enshittocene, but the insights feel old. Jaron Lanier mapped a lot of this terrain eight years ago in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I’ve taught over the last seven years.

    Doctorow’s Amazon chapter triggers the same shrug. The platform seduces us with convenience, tightens its talons, and gradually morphs from glossy marketplace into Temu-adjacent bazaar. True, and thoroughly litigated across a thousand essays and think pieces. We’ve been warned about the house always winning; we don’t need another tour of the casino floor.

    What I wanted—and didn’t get—was a deeper dive into the anthropology of the rot. Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” or “Joan Is Awful” doesn’t just wag a finger at platforms; it autopsies the psyche and the systems. New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka nails the gap: Enshittification is “pointed and efficient,” but reads like “professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages,” leaving you hungry for a larger cultural x-ray that goes beyond the usual suspects.

    To be fair, packaging a messy discourse into one memorable term matters; not everyone read Lanier or binged Brooker. Doctorow’s snark has its uses. A clean label can move an idea from seminar rooms to dinner tables. But once you’ve named the disease, the next move isn’t to repeat symptoms; it’s to map vectors, power centers, and countermeasures with fresh cases outside the Big Tech pentagon.

    So yes: I love the word. But the book left me underwhelmed. Doctorow has given us the bumper sticker; I’m still waiting for the field manual. The Enshittocene doesn’t need another catalog of platform sins—it needs a blueprint that shows how to break the flywheels, where policy and design can bite, and why our appetites keep refilling the trough. Name the era, sure. Now show us how to survive it—and, if we’re lucky, how to end it.

  • Caveman Meets Garage App

    Caveman Meets Garage App

    In March 2005, at 43, I was besotted with my Classic iPod and its holy clickwheel. It took a minute to learn how to tether it to desktop iTunes and wrangle my playlists (mostly podcasts), but I did it without pestering my wife, and I was proud. A newer iPod arrived soon after; I refused to learn its tricks. Once I master a gadget, it becomes my comfort zone—I’d rather live there than relocate.

    I listened to podcasts all night and during post-workout naps. My life felt archived in that iPod, which—ridiculously, wonderfully—made me feel plugged into the modern world.
    My wife, less sentimental, declared it obsolete. The future was smartphones. I recoiled. They looked like bricks of chaos—apps, updates, notifications—houseplants with demands, only worse because I had to squint at ant-sized text.

    By 2014, I still clung to the iPod. It wasn’t cheap loyalty: the headphone jack snapped about once a year, and I’d pay $70 at the local shop to resurrect it. Then September 2014 arrived, our twin daughters started preschool, and my wife insisted I get a smartphone—for school runs, doctor visits, playdates. Texting was essential; parenthood demanded it.

    So I pried my fingers off the fossil and bought a Galaxy S4 at Costco. To my surprise, downloading podcasts was blissfully easy. As a podcast machine, the phone was a star. Everything else? Lame. I hated watching tiny videos, reading tiny text, and spelunking for apps. The phone became a super-iPod; the rest of its features were just extra chaos. Texting was torture—my fat fingers whacked the wrong letters, and I backspaced my way through tedium. I barely used the thing except for podcasts. My wife envied my perpetually 90% battery; to console her, I’d brag that after an all-night podcast binge I dropped to a shocking 80%.

    Yes, smartphones are addiction machines that track, nudge, and strip privacy. True. But I only use a sliver of their powers because the tactile experience annoys me.

    Part of me resents the smartphone for killing the rotary landline. That dial’s ratcheting click felt like reciting a secret code to open a cave. Beige, avocado, mint green, custard—those phones had heft that implied quality, with long, flexible cords that snaked across the room. Conversations were events; an ear would grow tender and force the ritual mid-call ear swap. Now the landline is dead—and so, largely, are conversations, replaced by texts and emojis. Speed and convenience exacted their toll: degraded communication, which means degraded friendships.

    Cory Doctorow gave us enshittification—how tech optimizes itself into garbage. I’d love to say that’s why I resist. But that’s too pat. I’m simply slow to adapt. Incompetent with new tools. My memory refuses the steps; I have to re-teach myself, again and again.

    Recently, my wife synced my phone to our garage door. A week later, I tapped the app and watched the door rise, gawking like a caveman who just discovered fire and is already imagining a barbecued brontosaurus rack. It’s a good trick. I still keep Genie remotes in the house and car as backups, but the phone option is lovely. This isn’t enshittification; it’s the opposite—unsuckification. Some things that used to suck don’t have to anymore.

    In fact, I’m eager for toilet + AI matrimony: a throne that reads biomarkers, prescribes medication, screens like a colonoscopy, and spares me the waiting room. I’m also rooting for a custom GLP-1 patch that recalibrates appetite so a morning bowl of porridge with protein powder—and another in the late afternoon—actually sates me. Easy weight management, better markers, minimal dishes.

    All of this is part of the unsuckification project.

    I’ll admit it: I’m older, I resist change, and new tech gives me a headache. But if modern tech can spare me a colonoscopy, open heart surgery, and the indignities of being twenty pounds overweight, then sign me up. 

  • Eternal Embarrassment

    Eternal Embarrassment

    Nietzsche imagined hell as reliving your life on loop—eternal recurrence. A demon forces you to endure every joy and misery again. Let’s revise the experiment: not your whole life, just the embarrassing parts on repeat. Eternal embarrassment. If that isn’t the full biography, it’s certainly old age. You no longer fit the world. Your butt shrinks; belts stop doing their job. Cheeks sag. Your neck goes a little fleshy. Your interior vocal editor—never stellar—finally quits, so you talk more than anyone asked for, mostly about how cold you are and how the TV volume is too low. You’ve slowed down, and the world—amped on Red Bull—won’t wait.

    In two weeks, I broke two Samsung TVs, failed to sync my phone with the new garage-door opener, threw an infantile tantrum, and my wife had to bail me out. She could have gone full prosecution; instead, her annoyance was tempered by pity. She saw me trying—earnest home-improvement flailing—and, when I stumbled, she picked up the pieces. I was left embarrassed and nursing a small crisis of confidence.

    So I went hunting for redemption. My family had been grumbling about dinners. Thursday’s Caesar-with-chicken-skewers had overstayed its welcome; they wanted better lunch ingredients—better bread, meats, cheese, and more interesting condiments. As the designated Saturday Trader Joe’s runner, I sat at my computer, family gathered around, actually listened, and updated the list like I was drafting a treaty.

    Next morning—Saturday—I launched my ritual at Hawthorne and Del Amo, a tradition I’ve upheld with the zeal of a cultist for twenty-two years. Grocery shopping isn’t a chore; it’s a military operation. My $350 haul is executed with Navy SEAL precision. Delays, obstacles, small talk? Enemies of efficiency. Armed with the evolving list, I dart through aisles like I’m on Supermarket Sweep, a stopwatch ticking in my skull. 

    That morning, I stepped out of my gunmetal gray Honda, I caught a reflection in the store window—an angle so unforgiving it announced, We’ve had one too many second helpings. I looked away. Denial is cheaper than therapy. In my mind I’m a sleek, youthful me—190 pounds of toned potential, not the spectacle of a 225-pound man auditioning for the Dad-Bod Calendar.

    Inside, my confidence was restored. The staff knows me; they greet me with the friendly heckling reserved for clockwork regulars. If I show up off-schedule, they act like I’ve survived a plane crash. One cheeky clerk calls me the “Larry Csonka of Trader Joe’s.” I play along: “There’s been a Larry Csonka sighting in aisle five.” The rapport was golden—until The Incident. The shelf was barren of unsweetened soy milk—the only plant milk with actual protein. I spotted Mary, the assistant manager, stocking canned goods. I asked, politely, if there was soy milk in the back. She said she’d check, then resumed stacking cans like bullion. Assuming she’d forgotten, I quietly asked another employee to check. Fatal misstep.

    By the time I looped back with bread and pastries, Mary had stocked the soy milk—and wore a look that said I’d insulted her canned-goods ethics. In that instant, I crossed the border from beloved regular to pushy customer. Two decades of goodwill, spilled across the linoleum for a stupid carton of soy. If I could time-travel, I’d go home and order a case of Edensoy on Amazon. Once, I entered like Larry Csonka at a Super Bowl parade; now I skulked, head low, list clutched like a last shred of dignity.

    Trader Joe’s was supposed to be my safe space, but I botched it—just like the “simple” garage-door purchase. Simple things kept flowering into fiascos. I was busy processing shame and embarrassment when Nietzsche drifted back in: eternal recurrence. Except my condition was worse. Who needs to replay old humiliations when fresh ones keep arriving on the conveyor belt?

  • The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    Most people paddle along. We don’t have all the answers, but we keep the canoe upright. If you’re like me—diagnosed with low-grade depression, dysthymia—you brave forward and maintain emotional homeostasis by doing your duty to yourself, your friends, and your family. You exercise. You eat right. You post milestones on social media and affirm the tribe’s values, harvesting likes like daylight vitamins. You save for a rainy day.

    That’s what I did. So when the garage door opener finally died after twenty-five years, I called the repair company that had been nursing it for a decade and paid a thousand dollars for a replacement. The tech arrived—mid-thirties, dark blue baseball cap, beard, sunglasses—affable and chatty. We covered carne asada tacos, the garage door racket, and daily protein quotas. In under an hour he had the new Genie humming. And yet: the in-house wall button turned into a ghost button (opens nothing, closes nothing); he issued only one new remote, leaving my wife remote-less; and he didn’t sync the unit to the Genie app. “Easy,” he said, packing up. “Just follow the directions.” Then he vaporized.

    For the next two hours, I tried to enter the unit ID and sync via Bluetooth. Problem: the buttons weren’t labeled, the manual’s diagrams didn’t match my unit, and the app’s pictures didn’t match either. I called my neighbor Joe. He said the same company had given him two remotes—minimum. “Did you already pay?” he asked. “Yes.” “You blew it. He should’ve synced your phone before he left. You’ll never see him again.” I protested that he seemed nice. “He’s gone, dude.” Then, after a long pause: “Call and demand they come back—and threaten a bad Yelp review.” I phoned the tech; he said he’d try to fit me in “tomorrow,” which I translated as never. The company promptly sent me a link to post a Google review. I wrote a calm, three-star warning: skilled install, but details ignored; don’t pay until the phone is synced and both remotes are in hand. I pasted the same on Yelp. Not spiteful—just a PSA. And then the shame arrived like a stomach punch. I felt as if I’d betrayed him—though he’d arguably betrayed me. Why was I ashamed? Because I felt stupid for failing at the sync.

    ChatGPT didn’t rescue me, and the failed DIY made me feel worse—ashamed and anxious. Getting the garage fully functional had become a talisman for my emotional homeostasis. Without it, I began to tilt into the abyss. My wife came home from her middle school job; I explained the mess. She said she’d help later—first, a mountain of paperwork. I tried to stay quiet but kept circling back to the tech’s “betrayal.” My posture turned desperate and wounded; the tension thickened. She retreated to the bedroom to grade and watch TV. She wanted nothing to do with me. I don’t blame her. I’d become an emotional siren labeled The Garage Door Incident.

    The next day the tech never called. My wife, apparently an engineer in a former life, pulled off the white plastic cover on the unit, found the Bluetooth button, and synced our phones. She also programmed the second remote I’d bought on Amazon. She fixed everything the tech didn’t. I thanked her. She answered—kindly, but surgical—that I’m like her sixth-graders: no patience; I want the world to stop until my problem is solved. When I spin out like that, she needs distance. I nodded. Fair.

    That was three days ago. Since then, something has shifted. I’ll call it a Balrog Moment: Gandalf and the demon in Moria, the bridge cracking, both plunging into darkness. My shame—for incompetence, impatience, and those two negative reviews—shook my homeostasis. I dropped into a shaft of depression, self-doubt, and nihilism. My paddling rituals—coffee, workouts, piano, posting pungent morsels on social media, even drafting my biting book Speedos at Sunset: How Not to Age Gracefully in Public—suddenly felt flimsy, even ridiculous.

    This morning, staring into that abyss, I decided not to look away. The loss of homeostasis—the Balrog Moment—is the marrow of the book. The pain is vast; it drowns, it devours, it cross-examines everything I am. I’ve been sucked into a vortex of nihilism and self-doubt, and yet here I am, hunting for tools to claw back dignity, rebuild self-confidence, and find alignment in a world that keeps knocking me off center.

  • Speedos at Sunset

    Speedos at Sunset

    The New York Times article, titled “Skimpy Men’s Swimming Briefs Are Making a Splash,” offers a solemn dispatch from the front lines of GLP-1 drugs, but I would guess that men—having exhausted every form of visible self-optimization—are now expressing their Ozempic-enabled slenderness via tiny, Lycra-clad declarations of status. We’re talking male bikinis, or what I like to call the ego sling.

    Apparently, if you’re dropping $18,000 a year to chemically suppress your appetite and shed your humanity one subcutaneous injection at a time, you deserve the privilege of looking like a Bond villain’s pool boy. I suppose this is the endgame: pay to waste away, then wrap what’s left in a luxury logoed banana peel.

    Luxury underwear companies, never ones to miss a chance to monetize body dysmorphia, are now marketing these second-skin briefs not as mere swimwear, but as power statements. To wear them is to say: “I’ve defeated fat, joy, modesty, and comfort in one fell swoop.”

    I’m almost 64. My aspirations remain high—ideally, I’d like to look like a special-ops operator on vacation in Sardinia. But I know my place. I wear boxer-style swim trunks, the cloth of the pragmatic and the semi-dignified. They’re not exciting, but neither is seeing a sun-leathered septuagenarian adjust a spandex slingshot over a suspicious tan line.

    There’s a difference between being aspirational and being delusional. The former means striving for vitality, strength, and energy. The latter means stuffing yourself into a satirical undergarment and pretending you’re a twenty-two-year-old wide receiver with a sponsorship deal.

    To my fellow older men: sculpt your body like it’s your spiritual obligation—but when it comes to swim briefs the size of a hotel mint, maybe opt out. Not every part of youth is worth reliving. 

    When I think of old guys clinging to their youth by wearing undersized swim trunks, I often think back to the summer of 2019 when my wife and twin daughters were in Maui and I was treated to one of life’s great grotesques: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading the beach in dark-blue Speedos with a woman young enough to be his granddaughter. She was Mediterranean gorgeous, twenty-something, and clearly imported as the ultimate accessory. He was trim, shaved, strutting across the sand like a hedge-fund satyr who believed that constant motion kept the Grim Reaper wheezing in his wake. He dove into the surf not like a man swimming, but like a man negotiating—bargaining with Time.

    You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air. A CEO, no doubt—half his life in boardrooms, the other half clawing at immortality. His creed was Hefner’s: work hard, play harder, and Botox anything that betrays the passage of time. I’m not here to moralize about his May-December arrangement. What fascinated me was the fantasy: money, discipline, and a bit of manscaping as talismans against entropy, as if youth could be distilled into a cologne.

    But the tableau reeked of mismatch—two puzzle pieces jammed together with superglue. Forced smiles, awkward touches: every moment chipped another sliver from the illusion until they looked less like lovers and more like hostages. This was not youth preserved; this was youth taxidermied. His confidence read as terror. His curated life, meant to inspire envy, collapsed into a sad performance—a tuxedo on a traffic cone.

    He reminded me of Joe Ferraro from Netflix’s Mafia: Most Wanted: born in Ecuador in ’62, raised in Toronto, obsessed with bodybuilding, crime, and women. He had it all—the Rolex Daytona, gold chains, sunglasses so huge they had their own weather system. Then came prison and deportation. Now in his sixties, Ferraro is a sculpted parody: sport coat draped like a cape, tight black jeans, hipster boots, eyes full of melancholy. He wants his life back, but he knows the casino is closed. Like the Speedo satyr, Ferraro can’t stop looking back, calcifying into a monument of salt.

    And salt is the right metaphor: Lot’s wife glancing back until she froze mid-regret. Neither Ferraro nor Speedo Man could let go of their “youth identities.” Without them, death feels too close. With them, they look embalmed while still breathing.

    I understand how hard it is to let go of the life you think you deserve. Spend a week in Hawaii, and you step into a parallel universe—Sacred Time. You board a $400-million jet, dehydrate for five hours, and land convinced you’re immortal. Within 24 hours you’re marinating in mai tais, demolishing lilikoi pies, and basking under sunsets scripted by God to flatter your ego. Clocks stop. Deadlines vanish. Sacred Time whispers: Death can’t find you here.

    Which is why leaving Hawaii feels like a cosmic eviction notice. You board the plane and return not just to California but to Profane Time, where bills, emails, and mortality resume their tyranny. For weeks after, you’re sun-drunk and disoriented, still hearing waves in your ears while the neighbor’s leaf blower revs like a dentist drill. Sacred Time is an opiate; reentry is cold turkey.

    Nostalgia is the next fix. For me, it’s the summer of 1977 at Don Castro Swim Lagoon. I was fifteen—half-boy, half-bicep—sunbathing like a pagan sacrifice to the gods of narcissism, The Happy Hooker hidden in my gym bag, my skin baptized in banana-scented cocoa butter. That lagoon was my Eden: the girls in bikinis, the musk of suntan oil, the hormone haze of adolescence. That era hardwired me to believe pleasure was a birthright.

    But nostalgia curdles. Today I’m older, paler, a few Adonis fragments left in the rearview. What once felt like a creed now feels like a rerun of Fantasy Island with bad lighting. The boy in me still demands his sunlit altar, but now he feels like a squatter. Am I still bronzing in Eden—or am I frozen in salt, looking back too long at a self that no longer exists?

    Enter the “Return to the Womb.” Aging produces this primal regression: a desire not just for beaches, but for obliteration of responsibility. For me, it smells like Florida—the state of my birth, equal parts Eden and punchline. Mango air, coconut breezes, sultry rain: a fetal simulation with Wi-Fi. But even I know it’s not vitality; it’s paralysis. It’s not Life Force—it’s brain rot in Tommy Bahama.

    During lockdown, I tasted this desire to return to the womb. Pajamas at noon, Zillow scrolling barrier islands, buckwheat groats as immortality. My body synced with the rhythm of a hot tub. I didn’t want to emerge. I still don’t. Which terrifies me—because Father Time is no cuddly mascot. He’s a cosmic accountant, and he wants receipts. What did you do with your time?

    Meanwhile, I’m bicep-curling nostalgia like it’s protein powder. For five years, I hounded my wife about Florida. She countered with Some Kind of Heaven, the documentary about The Villages. Watching geriatric Parrotheads do water ballet to Neil Sedaka was enough to kill the fantasy. It wasn’t Eden—it was a gulag of shuffleboard and scheduled fun. Leisure not as freedom, but as occupation.

    The film’s standout was Dennis Dean, an octogenarian grifter prowling bingo halls for rich widows. Watching him lie catatonic under a ceiling fan after another failed con, I realized my wife had played me like a Stradivarius. My Florida obsession died in that moment.

    So now I’ve scaled back. No more eternal-Adonis-in-the-tropics delusions. No Speedos. Just a week vacation in Maui or Miami, then back to Profane Time with my Costco protein powder and kettlebells. Still chasing immortality—but with at least a fig leaf of self-awareness.

  • Out of Alignment

    Out of Alignment

    The following is an expansion from yesterday’s short post about old age into a full-blown chapter:

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? My solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The impact probably fractured internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.

  • The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    The World’s Unwanted Alarm Clock

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock. 

  • Death by Clean-and-Jerk: a TV Tragedy

    Death by Clean-and-Jerk: a TV Tragedy

    In the span of five minutes yesterday, I managed to destroy not one but two Samsung QLED smart TVs, each a 55-inch, three-year-old, $700 reminder of my own idiocy.

    Samsung Number One had been sulking in the bedroom, untouched for a week. I had banished it there after splurging on a $1,500 LG OLED for the living room. Last night I flicked it on and found half the screen swallowed in black vertical lines, like a funeral shroud. The culprit? Most likely my own heroic attempt to hoist it solo onto a dresser—an Olympic clean-and-jerk without the chalk or the applause. The impact probably jarred the LCD panel, cracking delicate circuits invisible to the eye but fatal to the image. Maybe a ribbon cable came loose from the T-Con board, which can sometimes be reseated if you’re the kind of person who enjoys performing surgery with tweezers and a magnifying glass. I am not. That Samsung was escorted to my office, where it joined the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a sort of graveyard for gadgets that lost their duel with me.

    Undeterred, I marched into my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—the TV I’d lent her after moving things around the previous week. She was at Knott’s Berry Farm with her friends, which seemed like a merciful stroke of timing. My plan: reclaim the Samsung, and let her inherit the old 43-inch LG, a relic from 11 years ago that weighs twice as much as the newer, bigger Samsungs.

    But hubris is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser, and I went at it like a gorilla in a hurry. I spread my arms wide to span its edges, but my right thumb betrayed me—it dug into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a feat of magical thinking, I told myself, “The panel probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines stood exactly where my Hulk thumb had pressed, like a signed confession of my clumsiness.

    Two lessons were carved into my soul in those catastrophic five minutes. First, modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second, I am unspeakably stupid.

    Now I must cram two cadaverous Samsungs into my car for their last ride to the eWaste center and figure out how to replace my bedroom screen. My daughter, surprisingly pliant, agreed to keep the old LG. As for my bedroom, I’m buying cheap: a $259 Roku 50-incher with deliberately low expectations. And from now on, I will follow the Prime Directive of Television Handling: any set larger than 40 inches must be carried upright by two people, no exceptions. This is not a powerlifting meet. There is no medal stand. A modern TV is a wafer-thin, brittle-screened diva.

    So: velvet gloves. And no grunting.

  • How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    How The Monkees Taught Me That the Intellectual Can Beat the Bodybuilder and Inspired a Song

    October 16, 1967, was a victory for the writers of cynicism. It was the day I learned the universe doesn’t give a damn. This was the day the veil was lifted. I was five, just shy of my sixth birthday, watching The Monkees, blissfully unaware that my entire worldview was about to be wrecked. The episode? “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling.” The plot? Micky Dolenz, the Monkee I admired most, gets metaphorically pancaked by Bulk, a human monument of muscle played by Mr. Universe Dave Draper. Bulk was no ordinary gym rat; he was a colossus in Speedos, the prototype Schwarzenegger. Worse, he stole Brenda, the beach goddess, right out from under Micky’s nose.

    Micky, desperate to win her back, did what any of us would: he signed up for Weaklings Anonymous. Their solution? Hoisting weights the size of small cars and downing fermented goat milk curd—an elixir I can only assume tasted like liquid despair. He even sold his drum set, jeopardizing the band’s future, all to build enough brawn to challenge Bulk.

    And for what? Brenda, fickle as fate, had a sudden epiphany—muscles were passé. She ditched Bulk for a scrawny intellectual buried in Remembrance of Things Past. Apparently, Proust’s multivolume exploration of memory and ennui was hotter than biceps.

    There, in front of my Zenith TV, I watched Micky’s heart crumple, and with it, mine. The moral of the story was clear and soul-crushing: hard work guarantees nothing. You could sacrifice, sweat, and sip goat curd until you resembled a Greco-Roman statue, only to find the universe had other plans—plans that favored nerds with library cards.

    The Monkees changed everything. The show taught me the brutal truth of irony: things don’t go the way as planned. I didn’t have the word for irony as a five-year-old, but I could feel it sending an existential chill through my bones. 

    As the decades passed, I finally processed that childhood memory into a piano song I wrote, titled “The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz”:

  • The Intruder from the Cypress Gloom

    The Intruder from the Cypress Gloom

    Sometimes you hear stories of horror and the supernatural, and you don’t know what to do with them, especially if the person telling the story seems sane and credible. As a result, the story lingers and haunts you for all your life. For example, I’ve never forgotten a story one of my college students told me back in the fall of 1998. She was a re-entry student—a nurse in her early forties—juggling coursework at UCLA with overnight hospital shifts. The kind of woman who sticks in your memory: short, sturdy, glasses perched low on her nose, with the weary, perceptive eyes of someone who’d seen too much and lips that knew how to pace a punchline.

    Most afternoons, after class let out, she’d linger by my desk and recount episodes from her Louisiana backwoods childhood or from the fluorescent netherworld of her hospital’s VIP wing. Her stories ricocheted between absurdity and horror—tales told with the calm authority of someone who could handle arterial spray with one hand and chart notes with the other.

    But one story gripped me by the spine and never let go. It wasn’t about dying celebrities or ER gore. It was about something far worse. A visitation. A monster.

    She and her cousin Carmen were feral children, raised in the lawless heat of rural Louisiana, where school attendance was optional and adult supervision was more myth than fact. Left to their own devices, the two girls invented what she called “mean games”—they tortured frogs, pulled wings off insects, and hinted at darker cruelties she refused to name. Lord of the Flies in sundresses.

    And then one afternoon, the visitor arrived.

    They were holed up in a decaying house, conspiring over their next cruelty, when the porch door creaked open and something stepped inside. It looked like a man. But it wasn’t. Over six feet tall, it had a tail—thick, muscled, and disturbingly animate. It moved with a will of its own, curling and flicking behind him like a fleshy metronome. His body was bristled with wiry hair. His voice? Low, hoarse, and calm in the most terrifying way. He didn’t threaten. He simply listed.

    Sitting in a rocking chair, the creature, a sort of rat-man, described, in brutal detail, everything the girls had done—every frog mutilated, every insect dissected. Nothing vague. He named the acts like he had them on file. And then he made his offer: Keep going, he said, and I’ll recruit you.

    He stayed for three hours. Just sat there. Breathing. Flicking that tail. Describing their path toward damnation with the steady tone of a bureaucrat explaining retirement benefits. When he finally left, dissolving into the heat shimmer of the Louisiana dusk, the girls were too stunned to move. Carmen whispered, “Did you see that?” My student just nodded.

    They never spoke of it again. But they changed. Overnight. Sunday school. Prayer. Kindness, enforced not by conscience but by fear. The kind that settles in your bones and never leaves. Whatever that thing was, it did its job.

    And this is the part that haunts me: she wasn’t a kook. She wasn’t mystical, manic, or given to exaggeration. She was a nurse—clear-eyed, grounded, more familiar with death than most people are with taxes. She wasn’t telling a ghost story. She was giving a deposition.

    To this day, I see those two girls, wide-eyed and paralyzed, staring down a thing that knew them intimately and promised them a future in hell’s apprenticeship program. Whether it was a demon, a shared psychotic break, or some mythological construct formed by childhood guilt and Southern humidity, I don’t know. But I do know what it meant.

    The creature’s message was brutal in its simplicity: Keep practicing cruelty, and you’ll lose the ability to stop. You’ll become it.

    That’s not just folklore. That’s biblical. The idea that if you repeat your wickedness long enough, God—or whatever you believe in—stops interrupting you. He doesn’t smite you. He simply steps aside and says, Go ahead. This is the life you’ve chosen.

    No wonder Kierkegaard was obsessed with working out your salvation with fear and trembling. There’s nothing more terrifying than the idea that damnation is self-inflicted, not by a thunderbolt, but by repetition. That the road to hell is paved with muscle memory.