Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Death Car Dilemma: How One Man Escaped the Camry-Accord Abyss

    The Death Car Dilemma: How One Man Escaped the Camry-Accord Abyss

    At nearly 64, with four decades of college writing instruction corroding his patience, Aiken Riddle found himself drowning in self-disgust. His life, once measured in lectures and essays, had shrunk to a tormenting question: Camry or Accord? He obsessed over the choice as though he were deciding between Catholicism and Presbyterianism, his eternal soul dangling in the balance. The absurdity wasn’t lost on him. He had genuine problems—blood markers creeping north, a torn rotator cuff ruining kettlebell workouts, rooms that needed paint, twin daughters who needed driver training, retirement forms stacked like gravestones, and joint bank accounts to secure before death turned his finances into a probate nightmare for his younger wife. Yet he couldn’t stop watching the YouTube videos and Reddit pages comparing the new Camry and Accord. 

    He vacillated like a madman.

    One day while driving to his twins’ high school to pick them up, he would see an Accord and would say to himself with a sigh, “Ah, the Accord EX-L in Canyon River Blue. A very peaceful color. Not a bad car to die in.” Then another voice would say, “It’s a car, not a coffin, dummy!” Then he’d retort: “But this will be the last car I ever buy. Surely, it is my Death Car.” Upon which he’d rebuke himself, “God, you’re morbid! How can I live with you? Get away from me!”

    Then the next day while picking up his girls from their school, he’d see a Camry SE in Heavy Metal and would say, “Ah, the Camry seems to be made for that color. Everything fits perfectly. Plus for under thirty-three K, I’m getting a taste of Lexus.” Upon which his other self would say, “At least you’re not talking about death. That’s an improvement.” Then he would say, “But the Accord is a quieter ride. I need quiet. Plus, the Accord dealership is walking distance away. I can drop off the Accord and walk home. That tips the advantage to Accord. But, wait, people are saying that the new Accord body style looks like an old Ford Taurus. Can I live with such ridicule?”

    Over the ensuing days, he would go back and forth. It reached the point that his wife could tell by his body language that he was about to talk about his Camry-Accord dilemma and she would interrupt him even before he opened his mouth: “Stop right there, buster! I don’t want to hear it. Just make your damn decision!”

    So he was alone in his torment. 

    One day he woke up and said he didn’t need a car. He calculated that for the last decade he had only driven three thousand miles a year. That hardly merited getting himself a new car. The decision was final: His daughters would take the old Accord and he’d give the newer one to his wife. He would simply borrow their cars when he needed them. 

    The decision was genius. He would not be less obliged to drive when he felt his driving skills had compromised over the last decade. He was by nature a recluse. His decision to not buy a car helped his cause. Why spend forty thousand dollars so I can behold a rarely-driven car in my garage before returning to the living room to play the piano or watch Netflix?

    He learned that sometimes a decision is not either/or. There is sometimes another option, and not getting anything can be the best one of all.  

  • Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

    Florida Fever Dreams and Katrina Floodwaters: Future Writing Prompts I Can’t Quit

    I work obsessively hard to develop essay prompts for my college students. When they prove effective and resonate with the students, I am gratified beyond words and will keep the prompt for perhaps too long. I have an assignment about a diet writer Rebecca Johns who in her essay “A Diet Writer’s Regrets” explores the irony and misery of gaining weight while dispensing weight-loss tips in her women’s magazine articles. Her inability to execute her own advice becomes an opportunity for my students to explore the notion of free will when it comes to weight management, especially now that GLP-1 drugs are proving that dependence on technology can be so much more reliable than aspirations toward self-agency. The students’ essays over the last four semesters have been truly engaging, revealing either their own weight-management torment or a friend or family member’s. 

    One problem, though, with an essay prompt is that as it gets used semester after semester some of the essay components, such as the counterargument-rebuttal section, start looking the same. I suspect the previously written essays become in some form or other available to the new batch of students, and for this reason, I think even the best essay prompts have a limited shelf life. 

    Another challenge with creating essay prompts is that you don’t really know how they will land with the students until you actually try it out. For example, I was very enthusiastic about my freshman composition class’s first assignment in which they write about the crisis of young men who lack a sense of belonging and purpose and how in their vulnerable state they become vulnerable to the deceptions, manipulations, and false claims of bro influencers. We studied the Liver King who is said to have made over a hundred million dollars and in his caveman cosplay, he was simply too ridiculous and grotesque for my students–all athletes–to take him seriously. He proved so absurd that whatever gravitas I was trying to squeeze out of the assignment just felt like a joke. While millions of men followed their organ-eating cult leader, my athletes were not impressed, and I felt that my essay prompt suffered for it. As a result, I doubt I’ll do that one again.

    Looking ahead, I’m thinking of Florida as less of a physical place and more of a mental fever swamp where I can explore the notion of freedom in its immature and mature incarnations. The TV comedy series It’s Florida, Man and the documentary Some Kind of Heaven about a hedonistic senior citizen home could be an effective exploration of the perils of perpetual adolescence. To avoid making the essay prompt nihilistic, I am leaning toward a contrast essay in which the students explore a more healthy kind of freedom as Cal Newport advocates in his message of “deep work”–the idea that focused work is essential to flourishing and self-fulfillment. 

    Another topic that possesses me is Hurricane Katrina, the idea that a natural disaster was made into a man-made catastrophe through neglect and reckless disregard for the people of New Orleans. This ignominious chapter in American history is a powerful window into red-lining, government corruption, and media misinformation. The riveting documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) convince me that I will be exploring Hurricane Katrina next semester. 

    My challenge with Katrina is making sure the story doesn’t collapse into pure tragedy. To balance the devastation, I need to highlight the unique culture of New Orleans—the joy, the tight-knit families, the music, food, and resilience that define the city. The message I want to leave students with is that, despite catastrophe, New Orleans has a distinctive soul that continues to draw the world to its city.

    I suspect even after I retire in less than two years I will still sniff out writing prompts. Coming up with essay prompts is my addiction, and this addiction isn’t going away anytime soon. 

  • Pleasure Island with Humidity: My Obsession with It’s Florida, Man

    Pleasure Island with Humidity: My Obsession with It’s Florida, Man

    I find myself embarrassingly smitten with It’s Florida, Man on HBO Max, a six-episode documentary romp that most critics dismiss with a shrug. The Hollywood Reporter’s Daniel Fienberg summed it up with clinical indifference: “The premise is very straightforward. Each half-hour recounts a real-life mishap of the kind that helped Florida develop its national reputation as a meme in state form . . .”

    Fienberg is right about the meme, but he undersells the spectacle. Florida isn’t just weird—it’s a hallucinatory soup pot where the heat never turns down. A bubbling Bouillabaisse of runaways, con artists, half-baked dreamers, and humidity-pickled misfits; the broth gets richer, stranger, and more intoxicating by the hour. Novelists like Carl Hiaasen dip their ladles in and remind us with glee: “You couldn’t write this if you tried.” Comedian Marc Maron, who has roamed the continental madhouse, concurs: there is no asylum wing quite as deranged as the Sunshine State.

    The final episode, “Mugshot,” is my favorite. A wanted man from Pensacola turns into a social-media celebrity after his mugshot detonates across Instagram. The local police, suddenly auditioning for daytime television, turn their manhunt into a Jerry Springer-style circus, complete with suspect-shaming and moral squalor masquerading as civic duty. You couldn’t script it unless you were drunk, desperate, and willing to risk being fired by HBO for turning in satire disguised as reportage.

    As a college writing instructor, I confess I watch shows like this with an ulterior motive: I’m always looking for essay prompts hidden in the wreckage. It’s Florida, Man practically delivers one to my desk, gift-wrapped in neon: “Freedom and its Discontents.” Not the noble kind of freedom—what philosophers used to call “freedom for”—where self-discipline leads to self-agency, flourishing, and mastery, the Cal Newport variety of cultivated freedom. No, Florida, Man wallows in the basement: “freedom from.” Freedom from the Id, from restraint, from consequence, from sobriety. It’s Pleasure Island on a peninsula, and the longer you stay the faster your ears sprout into donkey ears, your voice degenerates into animal brays, and your dreams curdle into swamp gas.

    It’s Florida, Man isn’t just entertainment. It’s anthropology of the grotesque, a front-row ticket to America’s most unruly carnival, where freedom is mistaken for license and the monsters are very much real.

  • Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    Exit Stage Left: A Teacher’s Final Act

    I’m fewer than four semesters away from retirement—June 2027, the final curtain—and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared. For nearly forty years I’ve worn the armor of a college classroom persona: bigger, bolder, more disciplined than the fragile, fumbling man who hides inside. Teaching gave me a stage and a referee’s whistle. Without it, who am I? Just the broken man-child without a supervisor, left to his own devices.

    During the pandemic, when colleagues were clawing to get out, I puffed out my chest and declared I was born ready for retirement. I pictured myself a disciplined Renaissance man: mornings at the piano, afternoons writing, evenings lifting kettlebells in the garage, book in hand before bed. A gilded schedule, as though I were independently wealthy. Now those boasts feel like hot air. Structure is one thing. The man animating that structure is another. In the classroom, the stakes were high: thirty pairs of eyes asking, Are you boring? Do you know what you’re talking about? The pressure kept me sharp, funny, and, occasionally, wise. No one lets you coast when you’re trapped under fluorescent lights for two hours with judgmental twenty-year-olds.

    Bitter irony: I’m leaving just as I finally got it right. It took me decades to balance theater with approachability, to drop the drill-sergeant persona that once scared students into silence, to actually build a classroom where people learned and laughed. Now I can scaffold essays like an architect and coax timid students into crafting arguments brick by brick. And just as the machinery is humming, I’m stepping offstage. Melancholy doesn’t begin to cover it.

    And then retirement makes you pay with loads of endless paperwork. Work forms that warn you that you cannot rescind your decision. Medicare forms with their cryptic alphabet soup (A, B, C, D), switching to my wife’s insurance, navigating private plans that read like IKEA instructions translated from Martian. I’ve joked I’d rather do faculty assessment reports than wrestle with retirement forms, and I meant it.

    Meanwhile, time itself heckles me. I’ll be sixty-four in six weeks. At my cousin’s seventy-fifth birthday, the guests—all seventysomethings—mingled like ghosts of futures to come. One cousin, seventy-eight, told me that old age makes you invisible. You still occupy space, but people’s eyes skip over you, as if you’re furniture. Old age is rude like that: the world resents you for hogging resources after your best years are spent. You should apologize for existing. Step aside, old man.

    So here I am, staring down a three-headed monster: paperwork, invisibility, and the slow evaporation of the job that kept me sane. What’s the plan? At six years old, I invented a companion—James, my imaginary friend. I’d knock on the apartment wall and tell my parents James wanted to play. They laughed, which only confirmed that James and I were onto something.

    Now, on the cusp of retirement, I feel his absence. Because when I think of retirement, I think of loneliness, and when I think of loneliness, I think of Gollum—squatting in the cave, muttering “precious” as he caresses the ring. Only for me, the ring isn’t a piece of jewelry. It’s youth. Precious, lost youth. I stroke it with nostalgia and curse it with bitterness. How dare people treat me like I’m invisible, when old age has taught me more than their Google searches ever will? And yet—I know this bitterness is the opposite of wisdom.

    So maybe I do need James back. But not the sweet, knock-on-the-wall James of childhood. I need James 2.0: a drill-sergeant life coach who will slap me across the face and bark: Stop whining. You’ve got love. You’ve got lights on in the house. You’re walking into retirement with more than most people ever dream of. Be grateful. And don’t you dare let this next chapter kick your ass.

  • How Soon Is Theft?

    How Soon Is Theft?

    In 1990, I was in my late twenties, a newly minted college writing instructor drifting through life with the ethereal soundtrack of The Smiths, the Cocteau Twins, The Trash Can Sinatras, and The Sundays rattling in my head. One afternoon on Hollywood Boulevard with my girlfriend, I did what any self-respecting young melancholic would do: I bought Smiths T-shirts and posters like sacred relics. The crown jewel was my “How Soon Is Now” poster, a portrait of an angst-drenched youth in a gray cable-knit sweater, gazing downward as if staring into the abyss. I taped it proudly to my office door, a shrine to my tribe. Within a week, it was gone—stolen.

    The theft still smolders decades later. It wasn’t just the insult of having something ripped from my door; it was the betrayal of the faith I placed in The Smiths’ congregation. Their music was heartbreak bottled into beauty, sadness transmuted into community. To love The Smiths, I believed, was to be incapable of theft. Fans were supposed to be fellow pilgrims on the same road to melancholy salvation. You don’t rob your brother of his relics. You light a candle with him and hum “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.”

    But there it was: my poster ripped away not by a barbarian from the outside, but by a fellow initiate. The irony was unbearable. If The Smiths could not protect us from base impulses, if their music could not ennoble even their most ardent listeners, then what was art worth? Wasn’t it supposed to make us better, kinder, less brutish? The theft of that poster wasn’t just petty larceny. It was the murder of a principle.

    To this day, I remember the empty rectangle of tape marks left on my office door, staring back at me like a smirk from the abyss. The thief didn’t just pocket a poster; they handed me a lesson in nihilism, gift-wrapped in Morrissey’s sorrowful croon. And I’ve been suspicious of beauty ever since, knowing it can inspire devotion and betrayal in the same breath.

  • The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

    The Bodybuilding Gollum of Shepherd College

    In Jordan Castro’s Muscle Man, paranoia has a name: Harold, a disgruntled English professor who stalks the halls of Shepherd College convinced his masculinity is shriveling under fluorescent lights and academic jargon. The place is no sanctuary of learning but a mausoleum of joyless theory—an institution where semiotics and power structures reign supreme, while Harold dreams of biceps, protein macros, and shredded abs. To him, the Priests of the Intellect are laughable scarecrows, their bodies soft as tomatoes skewered on toothpicks, their credibility dissolving with every Oreo they dunk between papers on Derrida.

    Banished to a basement classroom without sunlight, Harold becomes a musclebound Gollum snarling at his colleagues above, who bask in daylight and collegial belonging. Faculty meetings are his personal hell: an ordeal as odious as wisdom-teeth extractions performed by a dentist with no anesthetic and no soul. While his peers pontificate about “backward design” and “cohorts,” Harold visualizes his metabolism torching fat, each fiber of muscle flexing like a Renaissance sculpture coming alive.

    What makes Harold truly unhinged is Shepherd College itself—a cult in mortar and brick, built on the deranged philosophy of the late R.K. Mort, who declared that architecture should “infect” and “haunt” its inhabitants. Mort’s disciples fawn over his absurdities as if he were an academic messiah, turning the college into a dehumanizing theme park of theory. It’s Severance with faculty ID cards.

    As a lifelong bodybuilder trapped in academia myself, I relate to Harold’s plight more than I’d like to admit. Yet I nearly hurled the book across the room when Harold showed up to his interminable meeting without food. A man obsessed with protein who forgets to pack a meal? Unforgivable. In my forty years of teaching, I never once forgot to bring my Tupperware of chicken breast or Greek yogurt to the institutional trenches. I wanted to shout at the page: “Get in the game, Harold! Respect the gains!” Still, his misfit rage and comic pathos hook me. Harold may be a wreck, but he’s my kind of wreck.

    I’m only two chapters in but eager to consume the entirety of this delicious satire.

  • The Shock Jock Who Forgot to Pivot

    The Shock Jock Who Forgot to Pivot

    I still tune in to Howard Stern now and then, but most of what I hear these days sounds like a half-hearted reprise of his old shtick—sophomoric gags, body-function chatter, and adolescent innuendo that once jolted the airwaves but now just sag. In his prime, Stern was combustible: he blended pranks, irreverence, and enough genuine insight to keep his circus from collapsing. He earned his Radio Hall of Fame status by kicking down doors no one else dared touch.

    Now, as rumors of his retirement bubble and I endure his weary, autopilot banter with Robin, three thoughts claw at me. First: they don’t sound like they’re having fun anymore. This is a zombie act, plodding through the motions. Second: filling three hours of airtime every single day is a Sisyphean curse—nobody has that much worth saying without stuffing the sausage with sawdust. Third: we all have a shelf life. Relevance expires, and dignity demands a graceful exit.

    Stern’s curse is worse than most. His career persona—edgy, raunchy, forever pandering to prurience—has gone stale, but he’s trapped in it. The irony is brutal: a man smart enough to evolve chose to calcify. A decade ago, he could have pivoted, shed the shock-jock skin, and re-emerged as the wise veteran with conversations that mattered. Instead, while podcasts multiplied like caffeinated rabbits, he let himself be left behind.

    But maybe it isn’t too late. Imagine Howard 2.0: no longer the carnival barker of Sirius, but the philosopher-in-residence of his own café, sipping coffee and musing about culture, mortality, and meaning. Not fifteen hours of filler a week, but four hours of distilled insight—an hour twice a week, sharp and substantive. Podcasting is radio’s heir, and radio is in his DNA. Reinvention is the only antidote to irrelevance, and if he can summon the nerve, Stern could still surprise us.

  • The Man Who Always Waved

    The Man Who Always Waved

    When my twins were born in 2010, I spent years pacing the sidewalks of my Torrance neighborhood with them—first in a stroller, then a wagon, and eventually on their own unsteady feet. Along those same sidewalks shuffled old couples with dogs, walkers, and time to spare. Sometimes one half of a pair would vanish, leaving the other to walk alone, and soon enough that figure too disappeared from the neighborhood stage. I never knew most of their names, yet I felt tethered to them; they would smile at my daughters, wave with fragile hands, and in that exchange I saw the cycle of life laid bare: the beginning in my stroller, the ending in their absence.

    One man I did know by name—Frank. I don’t recall how we met, but I remember the details: his beige Volvo station wagon, the clever mirror nailed to the tree behind his house so he could back out with precision. Frank looked to be in his late sixties in 2010. He walked the neighborhood with brisk efficiency, always in uniform—olive shorts, white T-shirt, glasses perched on his nose, a beige bucket hat shading his face, and a small wristwatch on a leather band, which he consulted like a man keeping an appointment with life itself.

    He reminded me of a restrained Ned Ryerson from Groundhog Day: perhaps square at first glance, but steady, decent, reliable. No matter how intent he was on his route, he never failed to lift a hand in greeting. The wave was never exuberant, never perfunctory—it was graceful, automatic, the gesture of a man who seemed stitched together with quiet goodness. His wife matched him in cheer, and though I never learned her name, she radiated authenticity. They were a pair who seemed to exist outside of fashion, untouched by fads or pretensions.

    Over time, I realized they had become more than neighbors to me. They were a balm against my cynicism, proof that stability, kindness, and simple decency still existed in a world that seemed allergic to all three. Which is why, six months ago, while lifting weights in my garage, I felt a chill: What happened to Frank? I hadn’t seen him in ages. He would be in his eighties now. Surely he hadn’t slipped away unnoticed?

    Then, this morning, as I turned into my neighborhood after dropping my daughters at high school, I saw him. Frank, unchanged, same outfit, same bucket hat, same little watch. I raised my hand. He raised his. And before I knew it, a tear streaked my cheek.

  • Radical Boring: The Oatmeal-Based Lifestyle Brand No One Asked For

    Radical Boring: The Oatmeal-Based Lifestyle Brand No One Asked For

    Next month I’ll be 64, which apparently means my taste buds have joined AARP. My diet is now narrower than my tolerance for small talk: buckwheat groats, oatmeal (rolled or steel-cut, because why not keep things spicy), Greek yogurt with berries and honey, and peanut butter-and-honey sandwiches on dark bread. While normal humans dream of steak and champagne on a Paris-bound jet, I fantasize about oatmeal for dinner. Forget first class—I’m on the Oatmeal Express, and my only beverage service is dark roast coffee, soy milk, and sparkling water, which is just soda pretending it went to finishing school.

    I know what’s happening. I’m regressing. I crave mush, porridge, pablum—the kind of food that comes in jars with smiling cartoon fruit. My kettlebell workouts, five days a week, are my only defense. I sweat buckets, swing heavy weights, and imagine I look like a Viking—but in truth, it’s just a grown man clinging to his giant metal pacifier. Exercise has become my lullaby. When I collapse afterward, I feel less like a warrior and more like a sedated infant.

    Of course, at a family birthday party, one cousin reminded me that growth only happens when we leave our comfort zones. I nodded while thinking, No thanks, I’ve had enough character development for one lifetime. At this stage, I don’t want adventure. I want oatmeal. I don’t want novelty. I want predictability. I’m not only becoming a baby—I’m pioneering a whole new lifestyle brand called Radical Boring.

    My big act of rebellion? When my twins turn sixteen in six months, they will take my wife’s 2014 Accord, she’ll inherit my 2018 Accord, and I’ll step into the future—so long as the future, a 2026 Accord that comes in “canyon river blue.” My wife begged me not to get silver or gray again, so this is me living dangerously. Of course, I’ll rarely drive it. I’ll open the garage, admire the shiny paint, then close the door and scuttle back inside for a soothing bowl of oatmeal.

    My family laughs at me. They think I’m absurd, predictable, hopelessly domestic. But at least I’m consistent. And if authenticity means being true to yourself, then yes—I am authentically a 64-year-old content with my porridge, my pacifier workouts, and my canyon river blue Honda. Call it returning to the womb if you want. I call it destiny.

    And now, having confessed this ridiculous self-revelation, I find myself thinking of my literary kindred Ariel Levy and her An Abbreviated Life—a memoir I clearly need to revisit, if only to confirm that my brand of absurdity has precedents.

  • Words of Wisdom in a World of Publishing Hallucinations

    Words of Wisdom in a World of Publishing Hallucinations

    Last night I dreamed I was at the Aspen Institute, where I took the stage as a guest speaker while snowflakes pirouetted past the classroom windows like bored ballerinas. Dozens of young writers—already published, already duped—sat before me, waiting to be enlightened. I told them the truth their publishers had concealed with a smile and a contract: the marketing promises were fairy dust, the royalty checks were jokes, and their “book deals” were little more than elaborate scams. They would earn a pittance, and the betrayal would sting worse than any bad review.

    Some of them glared at me like I’d just blasphemed against their gods, but others—emboldened by rage—shouted the names of their novels and memoirs into the snowy air. A nineteen-year-old tech billionaire from India cried out the title of his memoir: The Gunther Effect. I made him repeat it three times, as if conjuring a spell, so the words wouldn’t slip away. Against my better judgment, I was intrigued.

    By popular demand, I returned for a second sermon. This time, I was flanked by professors and “established” writers who knew the game as well as I did. Their lectures weren’t brilliant, but they didn’t have to be. For me, just focusing on one speaker, narrowing the scattered kaleidoscope of my mind into a single lens, felt like mental hygiene—a purging of the Internet’s endless distractions. I thought, This is what I miss: the monastic joy of being a student, concentrating on one voice instead of chasing dopamine scraps.

    And slowly, the room shifted. The students began to understand that my colleagues and I weren’t cynics but keepers of the ugly gospel. We had the keys to the vault, the passwords to real power. We were the Priests and Priestesses of Light and Success, consecrated by disillusion. Hands shot up like candles in a vigil, their questions burning against the snowfall outside, and we were exalted, gratified, almost holy in the glow of their hunger.