Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    Dude, You’d Make a Great Eighty-Five-Year-Old

    When I was in my late thirties, I was visiting my wife’s family for a summer barbecue in Long Beach. Her brother and some of his friends were there. We were standing on the front lawn talking about some of my habits and routines: eating dinner no later than five; going to bed no later than ten; eating sufficient fiber; abstaining from alcohol but deriving great pleasure from sipping chilled prune juice, analyzing its complex flavors with the panache of a sommelier; driving to movie theaters an hour early to make sure I get a parking space and a good seat; avoiding long drives because I find them mentally taxing; and buying a car only after scouring the reliability data in Consumer Reports.

    At one point, one of my brother-in-law’s friends, Shane, a tall, Viking-like figure with light blue eyes and shaggy blond hair, casually looked at me and said, “Dude, you’d make a great eighty-five-year-old.”

    I can understand Shane’s comment. I am not a risk-taker. I like predictability and routine. I like reliable outcomes. I am drawn to things that give me assurance and safety.

    Take cars, for example. I am drawn to Honda. I have been buying Hondas for the last four decades. I like the interiors. They are familiar. I know how to use the controls. The ride is smooth. There is no drama. The styling is not too busy. It tends toward vanilla. I even like the word Honda. It sounds angelic, whispery, and soothing. Repeating the word over and over is a form of ASMR.

    My connection to Honda runs so deep that my wife and I both own Honda Accords. Hers is a 2014 with a 2.4-liter naturally aspirated engine, and mine is a 2018 with a 2.0 turbo. When our twins get their driver’s licenses, we plan on buying another Accord, a hybrid that gets around 50 mpg. Or perhaps a Camry Hybrid. Whichever brand is the most reliable when I’m ready to buy. Because I am willing to share my Accord with my daughters, I can hold off on buying my next car. I think I might wait until the 2034 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. By then, Accords and Camrys will probably get over 60 miles per gallon.

    Regardless of what I do, I will be anxious because a big purchase entails risk. I am risk-averse. To minimize risk, I seek monotony, routine, and familiarity. I subscribe to the adage that it’s better to be with the devil you know than the devil you don’t.

    This does not mean I’m provincial. I’d be just as happy having a bowl of oatmeal for breakfast as I would a bowl of Korean bibimbap. I find both dishes comforting. Both are familiar to me. Both are reliably delicious.

    So I’m a bit riled that in the summer of 2000 Shane said I’d make a great eighty-five-year-old. Actually, I would not. I can lift more weight than most men half my age. I love international food, the spicier the better. I watch daring, often subversive television, movies, and documentaries. I am, in other words, youthful and adventurous when it comes to exercise, eating, and entertainment.

    On the other hand, I am admittedly overly cautious and ridiculously obsessive when it comes to maintaining my routine and making big consumer purchases. But I think my contradictions should be appreciated. Labeling me prematurely old is inaccurate and demonstrates weak analytical skills.

    I love Shane. I wish him the best, and I am eager to locate him, if for no other reason than to discuss his appraisal of me as an exemplar of an eighty-five-year-old on my wife’s family’s lawn that summer day in 2000.

    I might even politely challenge him to an arm wrestle.

  • I Drove Home Without Trying on the Milk

    I Drove Home Without Trying on the Milk

    Last night I dreamed that a group of YouTubers who specialize in watches met at a museum where actors performed live reenactments of world history as a kind of Cirque du Soleil extravaganza. Empires rose and fell while acrobats dangled from the ceiling. Afterward, we gathered in the museum café to discuss the performance.

    No one admitted it, but we were all dead to watches.

    We weren’t ashamed of this, nor were we particularly proud. We simply didn’t know how to talk about it. These were people who had spent years discussing bezels, lume, movements, finishing, wrist presence, heritage, and the spiritual significance of shaving two millimeters off a case diameter. Now none of us cared. A watch was a watch. It told the time. Apparently, this had been its function all along.

    We had moved on.

    Oddly, nobody seemed sad or relieved. We were more like patients in convalescence, sitting around after surviving the same peculiar disease. The watch obsession had taken something out of us. Years of acquisition, research, comparison, anticipation, unboxing, disappointment, resale, and reacquisition had finally exhausted the machinery of desire. We had spent years looking for the watch that would end the search, only to discover that the search ended when we stopped caring about watches.

    After commiserating about the museum performance, we went our separate ways.

    Then my wife called. She needed a half gallon of milk.

    I stopped at a store, but buying milk turned out to be more complicated than I remembered. Apparently, you now had to try on the carton the way you would try on shoes.

    “Do you have this in a thirteen double-wide?” I asked the clerk.

    She checked. “Only thirteen regular.”

    I took off my shoe and inserted my sock-covered foot into the milk carton. Milk swished around my ankle.

    “Too tight,” I said.

    She told me she would look in the back for a wider model.

    Only then did the obvious problem occur to me. Hadn’t I just ruined the milk? How could they possibly put this carton back on the shelf after I had stuck my foot into it?

    The clerk, a blonde college student who looked about twenty, seemed puzzled by my concern.

    “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “It happens all the time.”

    I told her to forget about the double-wide. I would buy the milk anyway.

    I drove home with my half gallon, hoping no one would notice that I hadn’t tried it on.

  • How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    How to Age Without Ruining Everyone Else’s Day

    I was sixty-four when I attended my cousin Pete’s seventy-fifth birthday party at his home in Studio City. The place teemed with cousins and their friends, ninety percent of them over seventy, including the members of the Beatles-and-Stones cover band.

    When twilight arrived—salmon sky, ninety degrees—dozens of people in their seventies stripped down and leapt into the swimming pool like aging dolphins. They splashed, laughed, floated on their backs, and generally behaved as though the actuarial tables had been suspended for the evening. I remained beneath the canopy in long pants, swatting mosquitoes and sulking.

    I sat with a plate of hummus, feta, figs, and baba ghanoush and talked with Jim, my cousin Diane’s husband, a seventy-eight-year-old retired ophthalmologist.

    I told him about some of the challenges I was encountering as I entered my mid-sixties: early bedtimes, bladder-draining night patrols, and my growing terror of driving after dark.

    Jim leaned toward me, lowered his voice, and delivered a sentence that should probably be etched on my tombstone.

    “The hardest part of aging is becoming invisible. You still take up space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture.”

    I immediately thought of Dostoevsky—or rather a sentiment I associate with his darkly comic vision of human nature. After a certain age, merely continuing to exist begins to seem vaguely impolite. Forty is acceptable. Fifty is pushing your luck. Seventy-five? Now you’re abusing the hospitality. Mind your manners and die already.

    “Exactly my point,” Jim said.

    I was joking, but the joke contains an unpleasant truth. Call it The Mortality Courtesy: the tacit social expectation that aging people should manage their decline in ways that minimize discomfort and inconvenience to everyone else.

    Stay healthy. Stay attractive. Stay mobile. Stay independent. Don’t complain. Don’t smell strange. Don’t require assistance getting out of the car. Don’t hold up the line while searching for your credit card. Keep your hearing aids charged. Maintain bladder control. And above all, don’t become one of those frightening old people whose visible deterioration reminds everyone else where this carnival ride is heading.

    If you absolutely must age and die, please have the decency not to make it awkward.

    Tolstoy understood The Mortality Courtesy perfectly. In the wonderfully cruel opening of The Death of Ivan Ilyich, employees at a prominent law court learn that Ivan Ilyich has died. Almost immediately, they begin wondering what promotions and personnel changes his death might make available to them.

    Ivan is dead. Someone may be getting a better office.

    They are also secretly relieved by the most fundamental fact of the situation: death happened to Ivan and not to them. One person’s catastrophe becomes another person’s reassurance.

    Then comes the funeral, which presents its own set of irritations. Death requires scheduling adjustments. There must be displays of grief, solemn expressions, uncomfortable clothing, flowers, condolences, and perhaps an afternoon sacrificed to standing around a coffin when everyone has other things to do.

    The dead can be terribly inconsiderate.

    But Ivan’s greatest breach of etiquette is more serious. His death reminds everyone that they are fools for living as though they will live forever.

    That is the real violation of The Mortality Courtesy.

    We spend much of our lives climbing ladders of pleasure, status, acquisition, accomplishment, and recognition, always imagining that happiness waits on the next rung. Better house. Better job. Better body. Better vacation. Better restaurant reservation. Better retirement portfolio. Keep climbing and eventually you will arrive at the radiant platform where everything finally makes sense.

    Then some inconsiderate bastard dies.

    Suddenly the entire enterprise looks suspicious.

    This may explain why visible aging can make younger people uncomfortable. The old person isn’t merely old. He is carrying information. His stooped posture, hearing aids, liver spots, pill organizer, orthopedic shoes, and careful descent down a staircase are little dispatches from the future.

    Nobody asked for these updates.

    Wouldn’t it be more polite to remain eternally youthful and salubrious? Stay lean. Keep your teeth. Maintain excellent posture. Swim laps at seventy-five. Wear tasteful linen. Post photographs from Tuscany. Inspire everyone with your vitality.

    This is the kind of aging society can tolerate because it doesn’t look sufficiently like aging.

    Perhaps that is what fascinated me about Pete’s birthday party. The septuagenarians launching themselves into the pool were performing the acceptable version of old age. They were vigorous, social, musical, suntanned, drinking wine, singing Beatles songs, and behaving as though seventy-five were merely fifty with a better retirement account.

  • The Smell of Oatmeal at the End of the Universe

    The Smell of Oatmeal at the End of the Universe

    The older you get, the more you can feel like a broken alien—to others and even to yourself. You are no longer quite the person you remember being. This growing sense of estrangement creates a powerful desire to find your way home. You keep your eyes open for breadcrumbs that might lead you back. Sometimes a memory returns with such force that it stops you in your tracks.

    I have my own trail of breadcrumbs. One morning, I sat at the piano while my wife prepared breakfast, a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stove. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was suddenly four years old again, carried back to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires to find a home are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

  • My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    My Inner Buzzkill Has Tenure

    You don’t really understand the adage “you are your own worst enemy” until you hit your mid-sixties. A dark voice inside you grows louder, casts its shadow over the proceedings, and begins offering unsolicited commentary on your future. You can “stay active,” “think good thoughts,” exercise, and hit your daily nutrient macros, but the voice remains unimpressed.

    In my case, the voice sounds disturbingly like Glum, the slump-shouldered, pessimistic Lilliputian sad sack from the childhood cartoon The Adventures of Gulliver. Glum was famous for expecting catastrophe. His entire philosophy could be reduced to one sentence: “We’ll never make it.”

    My Glum has updated the script.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I can be minding my own business, driving across town to run an errand, swinging kettlebells in my garage, preparing overnight buckwheat groats while NPR murmurs from the kitchen radio, or reading the amino-acid profile on the back of a five-pound tub of protein powder when the voice crawls out of some dark crevice in my soul.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    I’ve heard the expression all my life but never paid much attention to it. Now I understand its appeal. It is an efficient little package of doom. Bad days ahead. Imminent disaster. Catastrophe. Loneliness. Helplessness. Hopelessness. Futility.

    Thank you, Glum. I was just trying to make breakfast.

    You have to take this voice seriously, not because its predictions contain great wisdom, but because the voice can make the genuine difficulties of aging worse than they need to be.

    Challenges are baked into the human condition. They should be accepted, perhaps even embraced, rather than rehearsed in advance. Suppose you buy a brand-new car. There is much to enjoy: the pride of ownership, the satisfaction of having researched every model within your budget, the latest safety technology, the quiet cabin, the sleek contours announcing to the neighbors that you remain a person of impeccable judgment.

    You just spent forty thousand dollars. You would like twenty minutes to enjoy yourself.

    Glum appears in the passenger seat.

    “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    There will be repairs. Recalls. Door dings. Insurance increases. Next year’s model will look better and get four more miles per gallon. Eventually the transmission will fail, and one day the entire magnificent machine will be crushed into a metallic cube.

    Enjoy your new car.

    Glum doesn’t help you prepare for life’s difficulties. He simply makes you suffer from them twice: once before they happen and again when they actually arrive. He is your inner buzzkill.

    Some people have a louder inner buzzkill than others. The source could be biology, culture, trauma, temperament, or some cocktail of all four. What matters is developing a strategy for dealing with him.

    First, identify the voice.

    In my case, Glum is a cognitive distortion—a mental event generated by fear and masquerading as prophecy. To understand him, I have to recognize that he is rooted in the primal fear of loss and death. The fear itself is real. Loss is real. Death is real. But Glum’s prognosis of my remaining life is not reality. It is fear pretending to be an oracle.

    Second, recognize the self-fulfilling prophecy.

    If I allow fear to curdle my ability to participate in the present, I will squander the very life I’m frightened of losing. I will have surrendered my power to Glum, and the resulting misery will appear to vindicate him.

    “See?” Glum will say. “Told you.”

    Of course he told me. He helped cause it.

    Third, recognize that Glum is the master of pre-suffering.

    Aging guarantees losses, frustrations, illness, uncertainty, and eventually death. Glum’s trick is making you experience these events before they happen. A future car repair becomes today’s anxiety. Future physical decline contaminates today’s workout. Eventual death ruins today’s oatmeal.

    You don’t need to deny future suffering. You need to refuse advance billing.

    When something bad happens, deal with the actual problem. Don’t pay interest on misery that hasn’t arrived. Otherwise you won’t be able to play the piano, work out, write, enjoy your breakfast, or do much of anything except rehearse catastrophes.

    Fourth, answer Glum by living.

    Glum says, “Handwriting’s on the wall.”

    Your response doesn’t need to be, “Everything will be wonderful.” That is merely Glum wearing a motivational-speaker costume.

    A better response is: “Perhaps. What can I do today?”

    Exercise. Write. Practice piano. Call someone. Eat well. Grade the essays. Take the walk.

    Agency doesn’t refute mortality. It prevents mortality from colonizing the present.

    Fifth, accept that you will never terminate Glum.

    He is with you. He has always been with you.

    Looking back, I realize Glum didn’t suddenly appear in my sixties. He was there during childhood. He was there during young adulthood. He has accompanied me through most of my life, providing an unwanted running commentary on the possibility that everything might go horribly wrong.

    I’ve even lost friends over the years because they consciously or unconsciously recognized my inner pessimist and went running for the hills.

    I don’t blame them.

    Some comedians have managed to turn Glum into a career. Richard Lewis comes to mind. He took the internal voice of catastrophe, dragged it onto a stage, put a microphone in front of it, and made people laugh.

    That may be one of the better ways of managing Glum.

    Mock him.

    Glum is an idiot worthy of ridicule, but he remains an idiot with tenure.

    And there is another uncomfortable truth. Glum is part of you. You’ve grown attached to him. You hate him, but you also love him. After decades together, you have developed one of those poisonous relationships neither party has the courage to end.

    Glum is your internal frenemy.

    So recognize him. Understand where he comes from. Laugh at his absurdity. Accept that he may never leave.

    But do not take orders from him.

  • Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    Fran Lebowitz Never Retired

    You can’t really understand the depths of retirement and all its complications without considering the life of New York personality Fran Lebowitz. She published two celebrated collections of essays more than forty years ago, and that more or less sums up her career as a productive writer.

    You could say she retired from writing, but that is too simple. You could say writer’s block ended her writing career, and that would be closer. But Lebowitz calls it a “writer’s blockade” and has compared her extended writing hiatus to the Vietnam War. She doesn’t know exactly how it started, and she never figured out how to end it. It just dragged on for decades, apparently without a viable exit strategy.

    Ordinarily, an artist who stops producing art enters a strange posthumous existence while still alive. The old work remains, but the artist begins haunting it.

    This does not apply to Fran Lebowitz.

    Deprived of her writing, the public got something better: Fran Lebowitz.

    She began showing up at colleges and auditoriums, answering questions with the same intelligence, irritation, precision, and wit that once appeared on the page. In this regard, Lebowitz became a professional personality. There is no blockage when she speaks. Nothing can stop her extemporaneous verbal wit.

    She is the consummate example of what I call Personality Migration: the transfer of one’s professional value from the original craft into the personality developed through decades of practicing it. Lebowitz’s wit migrated from the written page to spontaneous speech. The writer stopped writing; the writing voice survived.

    You would like to think that retirement might offer some variation of Personality Migration—that after leaving your profession, you could transfer your accumulated skills into another endeavor that highlights the best parts of your personality.

    This is easier said than done.

    It might even be dangerous to hold up Fran Lebowitz as a retirement guide. For one thing, she is a delightfully cranky genius, the epitome of the New York elite in the best sense. “Coastal elite” is usually a pejorative suggesting pretentiousness, trendiness, and pseudo-intellectualism. Lebowitz is something rarer: an authentic intellectual, so intelligent and culturally self-contained that she sometimes seems to exist outside ordinary space and time.

    Paradoxically, she is also more present in physical space than the rest of us.

    Fran Lebowitz lives without smartphones, computers, social media, and microwave ovens. She has observed that people staring at their phones are not actually where they are standing. Their bodies are present, but their minds have been abducted. They are displaced, distracted, and disoriented. The machine has hijacked the brain while the owner continues walking down the sidewalk.

    Lebowitz anchors us to reality. She also appears remarkably uninterested in vanity or delusions of grandeur. She has a delicious disregard for “her legacy,” what people think of her now, or what they might think of her after she dies. Not surprisingly, she has developed a following among younger people who find her analog, vanity-free existence strangely liberating. She has become fashionable largely by refusing to participate in fashion.

    When I think about Lebowitz’s migration from writer to traveling personality and try to identify her appeal as she speaks before sold-out auditoriums, I am reminded of Harry G. Frankfurt’s slender philosophical book On Bullshit.

    We live in a world saturated with bullshit. Advertising bullshit. Corporate bullshit. Political bullshit. Social-media bullshit. Self-help bullshit. Personal-brand bullshit. We swim through so much of it that we eventually lose the ability to smell it.

    Fran Lebowitz is a beloved exterminator of bullshit.

    She identifies it, exposes it, and kills it on contact. Better yet, she does this without presenting herself as courageous. There is no heroic pose. She simply appears constitutionally incapable of pretending that nonsense makes sense.

    When you listen to Fran Lebowitz speak, your entire body can quiver with the pleasure of recognition. Someone has finally said the thing without wrapping it in bubble wrap. You experience a kind of catharsis. Your illusions loosen their grip. For a few minutes, the fog clears.

    Who needs therapy when Fran Lebowitz is talking?

  • There Is No Free Luau

    There Is No Free Luau

    I recently dreamed that a high school friend persuaded me to go with him to Hawaii. The appeal was that he had discovered a life hack: We could attend Hawaiian luaus—traditional feasts—for free. He had somehow discovered a loophole in the airline tickets that allowed us to attend any luau we wanted and gorge ourselves to our hearts’ content without paying a dime.

    I was intrigued. So off I went, jumping from one island to another in pursuit of the free buffet.

    But things didn’t go as planned. We would arrive at a luau, load up our plates, and gradually the mood would change. The paying customers began glaring at us. Eventually someone would mutter, “Freeloaders.”

    My friend was undeterred. He ate with tremendous pleasure. Roast pig, rice, pineapple, whatever appeared before him disappeared into his mouth. The hostility seemed to improve his appetite.

    I was different. I felt guilty. I wasn’t wanted, after all. But somehow I had committed myself to following my friend on his eating adventures. Feast after feast, we were greeted with increasing hostility. Soon the paying customers began sticking toothpicks into the food with little flags displaying the price of each item. Apparently they wanted my friend and me to understand precisely how much our free lunch was costing everybody else.

    I stopped eating altogether.

    My friend continued to gorge himself without so much as a sting of conscience. I sat there surrounded by roast pig and tropical fruit while strangers glared at me as if I had personally engineered the collapse of Western civilization. Eventually they knew I wasn’t even eating, but that didn’t matter. My mere presence made them angry. I had become a symbol of everything wrong with the world: a man sitting beside a buffet he hadn’t paid for.

    Meanwhile, my friend was happily feasting on roast pig. If anything, the fact that it was free made the pig taste better.

    The dream taught me something about the meaning of “free.” Something can be legally free and still exact a price. I had the legal entitlement to the food, but I couldn’t bear the ill will of the people who had paid for it. Their anger became the bill. My friend and I had discovered the same loophole but inhabited completely different moral universes. I experienced every hostile glance as an invoice. He experienced every hostile glance as seasoning.

    By the end of the dream, I understood that I could never become a true freeloader. I simply didn’t have the stomach for it.

    My friend did.

    And he was going back for seconds.

  • Escape from Margaritaville

    Escape from Margaritaville

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    In fact, she was.

    Florida was not paradise. It was a crime syndicate.

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

    But only for a minute.

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

  • What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    What If Perseverance Is the Disease?

    In the 1970s, I wanted to become a Major League Baseball player. There was one problem: I sucked.

    I couldn’t hit a curveball. I couldn’t catch up to a high fastball. At third base, I could field a grounder and then launch the throw twenty feet over the first baseman’s head, turning a routine out into an emergency evacuation of the opposing dugout. By thirteen, the scouting reports were conclusive. I quit.

    Next came bodybuilding. I actually showed some promise. In 1981, I took runner-up in Mr. Teenage San Francisco. But that was about as far as the genetics were going to carry me. I could build a respectable mid-level physique, but I wasn’t going to become Sergio Oliva or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Those men appeared to have been assembled in a laboratory using replacement parts from livestock. I quit bodybuilding that same year.

    Then I wanted to become a pianist and composer. Unfortunately, reading music and writing compositions on staff paper struck my brain with roughly the same clarity as vector and stochastic calculus. Another dream quietly left the building.

    Next came the Smooth Bachelor.

    This was my plan to become a smooth, smarmy bachelor who knew exactly what to say to women. My life would be full of hot tubs, champagne, water beds, and lava lamps. Unfortunately, I possessed approximately the same romantic smoothness as Richard Lewis after five cups of espresso. The Smooth Bachelor era was brief and catastrophic.

    Then came the big one.

    I would become a novelist.

    This ambition survived longer because I could actually write. I had a quirky, neurotic personality. I could make people laugh in conversation. Surely these qualities meant that somewhere inside me lived a novelist waiting to emerge.

    They didn’t.

    My novels were usually constructed around premises sturdy enough to support a Saturday Night Live sketch. I would then stretch the premise across two hundred pages and wonder why the resulting manuscript felt less like a novel than a short story being held against its will.

    They were reliably unreadable.

    Yet this was the dream I had the greatest difficulty quitting because becoming a novelist wasn’t merely another ambition. I had turned it into redemption.

    The published novel would retroactively make sense of everything. All the neurosis, misanthropy, social awkwardness, failed ambitions, compulsions, humiliations, and self-sabotage would be transformed into literary material. I wouldn’t merely have suffered from my peculiarities. I would have monetized them.

    Even better, people would admire me.

    This was the part I was reluctant to admit.

    Publication had become my Holy Grail of affirmation and vindication. Somewhere in my imagination, people were rising to their feet:

    “Ladies and gentlemen, Jeff McMahon has done it! The failed baseball player, failed bodybuilder, failed pianist, failed composer, and failed Hot Tub Stud has finally fulfilled his destiny. He is a novelist!”

    Applause.

    Someone brings me a chilled beverage.

    Someone else produces a generous slice of carrot cake.

    “Make sure this man feels loved. Make sure he feels special. He has suffered enough.”

    Once I understood that fantasy, perseverance became a much more complicated virtue.

    We are constantly told that perseverance reveals character. Keep going. Never surrender. Follow your dream. Winners never quit.

    But what if perseverance isn’t always strength?

    What if sometimes it is fear wearing a motivational T-shirt?

    A person can keep pursuing a goal because the goal remains worthwhile and attainable. But he can also keep pursuing it because quitting threatens some deeper fantasy about who he needs to become. He isn’t persevering because the work is flourishing. He’s persevering because he has assigned the achievement an impossible psychological task: Make me worthy. Vindicate my life. Make people admire me. Make me feel loved.

    Under those conditions, perseverance stops looking noble.

    It starts looking pathological.

    That is why Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting feels less like another book on my reading list than an intervention. For someone of my temperament, quitting isn’t necessarily evidence that I lack character. Sometimes quitting may require more character than continuing.

    I’ve spent enough of my life chasing various Holy Grails of vindication.

    At this point, I’d like to know which quests are worth finishing—and which ones deserve to be abandoned in the woods.

  • The Salvation Hustle

    The Salvation Hustle

    You reach a point in life when everything feels desperate. Losing weight will save you from dying in your bed at night from sleep apnea. Writing a publishable book or viral essay will save you from being both irrelevant and useless. Making a viral video will do the same. Embarking on a successful podcast will keep you mentally alive and “part of the conversation.” Starting your own restaurant featuring your grandmother’s brisket with gravy made from a secret family recipe will put you on the map and change what it means to enjoy good brisket. Become a yoga instructor and open your own studio to help people reinvent themselves in ways no one could have imagined. You’re special, dammit, and you’re going to prove it. You just need to work harder. So you must do this. You must do that. Make more sacrifices. Get on the true path. Never take your eyes off the prize.

    But a voice breaks through your insanity and tells you that you’re on a fool’s errand. You’re trying to save your life. Deep down, you know you are losing it.

    That same voice says: Let go. Surrender to the things you can’t control. Don’t live out other people’s fantasies of success. Don’t think fame and popularity will make you whole. Don’t confuse fame and popularity with love. It’s not love. It’s desperation.

    So you retire your delusions. You realize that all the time and energy invested in your various mirages were killing you. You were making a bad investment. Take stock. Assess the damage. You become certain that it’s time to abandon your many chimeras and start from scratch. Use your time and energy on projects rooted in sanity, projects that might actually bear fruit.

    The problem is, you don’t have a clue what these new projects will be. You’ve lived in a fever dream for years, perhaps decades. Where do you begin?

    Such is the existential challenge presented in Lindsay Crouse’s The Case for Quitting: The Surprise Benefits of Opting Out. She observes that too many of us spend enormous amounts of desperate energy auditioning for the role of superstar—the venerated, successful person who sets records and raises the bar in whatever field we pursue, believing that this prized status will make us whole and happy. We create unrealistic expectations and often head down the wrong path. Then we become so exhausted from pursuing our dreams that we no longer have enough distance to assess whether those dreams are even viable.

    Crouse uses the metaphor of a duck to describe this desperate period of her life: “gliding along on the surface while my legs churned furiously below.” That brief description perfectly captures the life of quiet desperation described by Henry David Thoreau. Always auditioning for some desirable role, we glide along on the surface while below our legs churn furiously in pursuit of some fruitless endeavor.

    Crouse argues that we should take stock of all that furious churning and, when necessary, put an end to it. It’s called quitting. Contrary to society’s condemnation of “the quitter” as someone who lacks perseverance, the real character flaw may be the refusal to quit: cowardice. You need the courage to interrogate the results of your endeavors and ask whether those results merit perseverance. In some cases, quitting can be a good thing. Crouse offers an “alternative definition” of quitter from the Middle French: “to set free.”

    All her life, Crouse confesses, she has been a high achiever, fiercely competitive, always pushing herself to the limit and loath to interrupt her path to glory. When an injury threatened her athletic training, she’d forego the doctor and take an Advil instead. Late-night runs were aided by GPS. When her grandmother died, she didn’t tell her team for fear that it would compromise their performance.

    Looking back at the ways she pushed and punished herself, Crouse questions the wisdom of these often ruthless efforts. Her self-interrogation became serious after she had two children and realized she didn’t want to pass on her “darker types of perseverance” to them. Self-abuse is one thing. Teaching your children the habits of self-abuse crosses the line.

    When the forces of ambition are no longer part of your flourishing but have become a dark pact with fear and desperation, it may be time to abandon ship. It may be time to move on.