Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • Memoirs of a Tanned Narcissist

    Memoirs of a Tanned Narcissist

    The summer of 1977: I was fifteen, half-boy, half-bicep, bronzing my delusions at the Don Castro Swim Lagoon. I lay stretched across the sand like a sacrificial offering to the gods of narcissism, a dog-eared paperback of The Happy Hooker tucked inside my gym bag like contraband scripture. My nose, my skin, my hormonal soul were all baptized in the collective perfume of that era—banana-scented cocoa butter and coconut oil sizzling on sunbaked flesh.

    It wasn’t just a swim lagoon; it was a sensory bacchanal. My eyes devoured the parades of bikini-clad girls, but it was the scent—the olfactory gospel of the ’70s—that tattooed itself onto my brainstem. The decade fused with my adolescence to form a perfect cocktail of lust, leisure, and delusion. That was Me Time before “me time” became a self-help cliché. This was Me Time as a birthright. An ecstatic creed. A half-naked mission statement.

    I hoarded that fragment of the 70s like a holy relic, a sweaty teenage talisman that whispered, You are entitled to this pleasure. And for decades, I believed it. I ritualized it. I salted it into the marrow of my daily habits. Self-indulgence wasn’t a guilty pleasure; it was as essential as cod liver oil and calf raises.

    But now, older, less tanned, and with only traces of Adonis left in my rearview mirror, I wonder if that Me Time ethos has become a prison disguised as a spa. What began as a teenage philosophy of sacred sensuality now feels like a rerun of Fantasy Island with worse lighting. The coconut oil that once anointed me has turned rancid with nostalgia.

    Am I frozen like Lot’s wife, looking back too long at the sun-glazed glory of the past and turning to salt—one of the many malformed, glittering relics trapped in the Salt Mines of my own mythology? Have I confused my emotional scrapbook for a roadmap?

    I don’t want to kill the boy inside me. I just don’t want him running the show.

    I’m not aiming to become some dried-out stoic spouting bromides about detachment and virtue while chewing flaxseed in silence. I still want pleasure. Complexity. Shadow. Laughter. Sweat. But I want to carry my memories like a man, not drag them around like a stunted boy still snorting the ghost of Hawaiian Tropic in the Rite Aid aisle.

    So I ask—how do you love the Me Time Era less? How do you put the suntan oil back in the bottle?

  • Naked at the Piano Store

    Naked at the Piano Store

    Last night I dreamed I was dragged, not willingly, to what can only be described as a nocturnal daycare megachurch for toddlers. A female friend insisted I come with her, and because I lack boundaries in dreams, I agreed. It was night—an odd time for finger paints and tantrums—but the daycare manager, a woman in her forties with the strained face of someone who’d long since traded dreams for wet wipes, greeted us like this was normal.

    Almost immediately, a child began howling with the primal rage of someone denied a third juice box. I was conscripted to console him. My solution? A trip to a movie theater—because nothing says early childhood healing like surround sound. The child settled, spellbound by whatever played on screen. The strange part? I couldn’t see it. Or hear it. Apparently, the film was perceptible only to children. Perhaps it was Baby’s First Metaphysics. Or an encrypted Pixar feature accessible only through a purified heart.

    At some point, without ceremony or explanation, I slipped away and found myself on a college campus in daylight. My brother was waiting in a parking lot that looked like a car dealership I had overfunded. I had more cars than common sense and a key ring jangling with so many keys it looked like I had robbed a locksmith. He wanted me to follow him to our mother’s house. It suddenly felt urgent. Cosmic, even.

    I got in my vehicle—a car awkwardly tethered to a trailer—and, for reasons known only to dream logic, I drove from the trailer. It took me several minutes to realize I was operating a vehicle from behind, without a windshield or visibility. I was essentially piloting a missile blindfolded.

    Eventually I stopped—miraculously not dead—and found myself balanced at a deadly incline on an overpass. I had parked inches from becoming a traffic statistic. Bystanders stood around, but no one was mad. No one honked. It was as if my recklessness had occurred in a different dimension of social expectation.

    Near the overpass stood a shopping plaza featuring Yamaha grand pianos, each with the sticker shock of a midlife crisis: $26,000 apiece. I considered entering, comforted by the notion that I had “deep pockets”—but the moment I thought it, I realized I was naked. Fully, publicly naked. Oddly, this didn’t mortify me. I was as invisible as a ghost no one remembered to summon.

    Still, I decided not to enter the piano store and sit bare-bottomed on an $8,000 piano bench. Even dream logic has hygiene limits.

    I wandered into a pair of adjacent, carefully curated Edens—two burial gardens laid side by side, one Jewish, one Christian. Both were equal parts reverence and real estate, immaculately landscaped like death had hired a design team. The air was golden with sunlight, the kind that flatters grief and makes you forget about decay.

    Mourners floated among the headstones in their ceremonial best—linen suits, black veils, tailored despair. The Jewish and Christian worshippers moved in peaceful parallel, as if the afterlife had negotiated a truce that the living never quite managed. Gift shops nestled among the tombstones sold tasteful souvenirs—stone etchings, pressed lilies, probably a limited-edition Torah-meets-Gospels keychain. Everything was clean, sacred, and suspiciously well-funded.

    That’s when she appeared—a Quaker woman in a starched bonnet, all radiant calm and pioneer wisdom. She approached like someone who could knit an entire theological treatise while making a pot of herbal tea. Her smile was unshakeable, beatific in that unnerving Quaker way that suggests she knows something you don’t, but she’ll never say it out loud.

    She asked, in a voice smooth as chamomile, why I looked so troubled.

    I told her the truth: “I’m lost. I’ve been driving blind—literally—and now I’ve crash-landed in a dual-faith necropolis. Also, I’m naked. No clothes, no GPS, no plan. I think I took a wrong turn at sanity.”

    She didn’t flinch. Of course she didn’t. She’d seen worse. She probably taught Sunday school to ghosts.

    She smiled. Help was at hand.

    She summoned a tall man in a radiant yellow tunic—somewhere between a monk and a spa manager—who told me the directions home were complicated and could only be followed on foot. What about my car? My trailer? My sprawling fleet of unnecessary transportation?

    “Let it go,” he said, as if he’d read Marie Kondo for the Soul.

    Suddenly, I was surrounded by Quakers. They had me sit on a wooden chair as the daylight shifted to an amber hush. They prayed in Latin, pouring syllables over me like baptismal water. It was solemn. It was sacred. It was disorienting.

    When it ended, the woman in the bonnet asked if I’d been converted.

    “Not exactly,” I said. “But I did have a religious phase in high school. I was a big fan of Rufus Jones. Fundamental Ends of Life—ever read it?”

    She hadn’t. She was more of a George Fox girl. Fair enough.

    I thanked them for the baptism but declined the full spiritual onboarding. I had priorities: get to my mother’s house, find some clothes, and maybe return for the piano if I could be properly trousered.

    I descended a steep, stone staircase into dense green foliage. At the bottom, I hoped, would be pants—and clarity.

  • Reginald, Kent, and the Shark-Infested Sea of Self-Improvement

    Reginald, Kent, and the Shark-Infested Sea of Self-Improvement

    Last night, I dreamed I was twenty again. I was in attendance at a spectral dinner party filled with strangers and vague regret. I was young again, which is to say, raw and restless, clutching a satchel full of unformed ambitions and unfiltered loneliness. 

    A wealthy young man appeared, oozing charisma and vaguely European cheekbones, a demigod of fashion and cosmetics, the kind of person whose cologne smells like entitlement. He leaned in and offered me a revelation disguised as skincare: two miracle creams. One, to be applied to the crown of my head, was called Reginald. The other, for my back, was Kent. He spoke of them with the hushed reverence usually reserved for ancient scrolls or Swiss watches. These weren’t mere moisturizers—they were spiritual lubricants. Balms that promised not just hydration, but orientation. 

    Then, as if summoned by a higher capitalist calling, he vanished mid-conversation, leaving me with a business card and a lead on where to find a lifetime supply—somewhere by the sea. And so began the quest.

    To be worthy of Reginald and Kent, one had to wear formal attire, because of course one did. I found myself in a tailored black suit, wading through surf with fellow seekers, sharks gliding around our ankles like corporate anxieties. I held my leather dress shoes in hand, lest the saltwater stain them—a fool’s hope, given the bloodthirsty tide. Later, I caravanned with aging rock royalty—Peter Gabriel, Jackson Browne, Boz Scaggs—who casually discussed their rendezvous plans in Capri or St. Barts. For a moment, I basked in the illusion of belonging. But as the conversation turned to private jets and generational wealth, the truth descended: I was no musician. I had no bookings. My only claim to transformation lay in acquiring my precious creams.

    The journey devolved into a surreal slog. It rained as I crossed a deserted college courtyard. My business shoes were doomed. A younger version of S—someone I wouldn’t meet until decades later—appeared like a ghost from my professional future, pointing the way with a sense of urgency. I ran, I hitchhiked, I boarded phantom trains, only to land back at the shark-infested beach, no closer to the mythic Land of Body Cream. 

    Then, through the humid haze of beachside commerce and quaint seaside cafes, I saw Rachel—yes, that Rachel—from a hot tub party in Livermore, 1988. 

    Seated at a weathered café table under a string of flickering patio lights, I unspooled my sorrow before her, pouring it out like a battered thermos with a cracked seal—dripping, lukewarm, and uninvited. I mistook my own rawness for profundity, believing that the sheer weight of my unfiltered confession would conjure tenderness, maybe even love. But Rachel didn’t flinch. She studied me like a dissection project and began her work with clinical precision. Her words carved deep and clean, a verbal autopsy that exposed every rot-soft corner of my character. And just when I thought the vivisection complete, she found new organs of dysfunction to prod and slice. Her fury wasn’t wild—it was righteous, surgical, sustained.

    She stormed off, heels tapping out a verdict on the pavement. I sat stunned in the wreckage of myself, staring at the space she had vacated, still warm with contempt. That’s when the restaurant owner appeared—a woman with the weary kindness of someone who’s witnessed too many romantic collapses and kept score. She told me she’d filmed the entire scene. “You’ll want to study this,” she said, handing me the video with a nod toward the attic stairs. “It might help.” I obeyed without a word.

    I climbed into that attic, its rafters bowed with time, and watched the footage on an aging monitor. Again and again. I rewound every insult, paused on each flinch of mine, cataloged every truth she hurled like a polished blade. It became my gospel of failure. I spent the rest of my life up there—alone with my ghosts and her voice—striving to earn back something I’d never really had: the right to reenter the world and claim Reginald and Kent, the sacred creams of redemption I still believed might set me right.

  • Influencer or Inmate? Life Inside the Fitness Content Machine

    Influencer or Inmate? Life Inside the Fitness Content Machine

    There’s a fitness influencer I’ve followed on YouTube for a while—a guy who blends science-based insights with bro-tier charisma, serving up advice on hypertrophy, fat loss, and the alchemy of supplements with the confidence of a man who knows his macros better than his mother’s birthday.

    He’s shredded, of course—because on YouTube, being credible in fitness means having the torso of a Greek statue and the face of someone who hasn’t eaten a donut since the Obama administration. As another influencer once confessed, the price of entry into fitness fame isn’t just knowledge. It’s abs sharp enough to julienne zucchini.

    But lately, something’s changed. The man looks wrecked. Gaunt. Like he’s been sleeping in a protein tub and bathing his eyes in pool chemicals. His cheekbones could slice paper. His eyes are red and sunken, with the haunted look of someone who’s either seen a ghost or hasn’t blinked since hitting “record.”

    I don’t think this is just lighting or a bad filter. I think this guy is overworked, underfed, and teetering on the edge of burnout. He probably wakes up at 4 a.m. to research clinical studies on mitochondrial function, spends six hours editing thumbnails and B-roll, then crushes a fasted two-hour workout before filming five segments in a single dry-scooped breath. If he’s eating more than 2,000 calories a day, I’ll eat my creatine scoop straight from the tub.

    The irony is hard to miss: he’s the poster boy for health and vitality, yet he looks like a prisoner in the content mines. At nearly four million subscribers, maybe it’s time he hires an editor, gets a co-host, and reclaims his circadian rhythm. Right now, he looks less like a beacon of wellness and more like an exhausted monk, punishing himself in service to the Algorithmic God.

  • Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Eschatology with a Side of Mangoes

    Exactly three months from today, I’ll turn 64. Which means I now live in that strange hinterland between actuarial footnote and walking myth. If adolescence introduces a 13-year-old to waves of chemical chaos and operatic feelings, one’s sixties bring their own interior weather system—gusts of existential dread, sudden squalls of nostalgia, and long humid stretches of unnameable longing.

    One thing I’ve learned: I detest cowardice in the face of mortality. I’m not after false bravado or some barrel-chested denial of death. What I want is a middle path—courage without spiritual negligence, composure without cosmic amnesia. My Jewish relatives on my mother’s side don’t see the need for salvation—certainly not in the harrowing Christian sense of eternal stakes. Meanwhile, my Catholic father’s family insists you better not die with your pants down. Meaning: be ready. Eternity, like a TSA agent, does not tolerate surprises.

    These opposing legacies leave me bouncing between Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling and Pascal’s cold-blooded Wager. What if belief is a cosmic bet and I’m holding a busted flush? The writer Jerry L. Walls offers a possible lifeline with his arguments for post-mortem salvation—but only if you squint hard enough and don’t mind a theological gray zone. Still, I’m annoyed—and I mean truly annoyed—that I remain agnostic on the most important question of all. 

    But let’s leave eschatology for now and talk about something far more pressing: my inexplicable, almost primal desire to move to the tropics.

    More specifically, Florida. Yes, that Florida—the state of my birth, the national punchline. But in my dreams, it’s not today’s meth-and-misrule Florida. It’s a mythic, fragrant Eden—a sensual vision of coconut palms, mango air, tropical rain falling like music, and an ocean that feels more like the Mother’s Womb than a giant salty death trap. It’s not a real place. It’s Jung’s beach resort.

    Unfortunately, my wife refuses to move there. Too many reasons to name. So I’ve drafted a respectable Plan B: South Carolina. Still sticky, still green, still filled with those sweet tropical mangoes that perfume your skin. Close enough to my psychic homeland. Good enough for the myth to survive.

    And while we’re speaking of myths—let’s talk about the one in my mirror.

    I want to look like the teenage Adonis I once was. Not in some delusional “Silver Sneakers” sort of way, but with genuine conviction. I hit the garage gym, slam down protein and fish oil, and pop creatine like I’m prepping for Mr. Olympia 2089. Deep down, I know my aging joints and erratic hormones are staging a quiet rebellion. But I lift anyway, as if my Mythical Self must match the Mythical Seascape. Call it folly, call it denial—but when reality stings, myth becomes the better moisturizer.

    Then there are The Big Questions, hovering like philosophical fruit flies:
    Does life have meaning?
    Is ennui a moral failure or simply being awake in a stupid world?
    Is anhedonia just a side effect of broadband internet?
    Are our souls sculpted by divine intention or evolutionary leftovers?
    Why are the most sincere believers often either morally wholesome or the most toxic people alive?
    And why is sincerity—God help us—no guarantee of goodness?

    I should care about these questions. But honestly, I care more about my morning bowl of buckwheat groats slathered with mango slices and a French-press tsunami of dark roast. I care about losing ten pounds before my doctor lectures me about cholesterol. I care about making it to 64 with most of my joints intact and my mind still more interested in Kierkegaard than clickbait.

    And I suppose that’s the final humility: I’ve lived long enough to know I don’t have the answers. Like any person, I wish I could be comforted by certainty and absolutes. The only certainty and absolute I have is to be humble in the face of my skepticism and doubts. 

  • The Pool of Sorrow, the Magic Towel, and the Heavy-Duty Radio

    The Pool of Sorrow, the Magic Towel, and the Heavy-Duty Radio

    Last night, I dreamed I was nineteen again—muscular, misfit, and miserably alone. In this grim redux of my youth, I spent my days floating in what I now call The Pool of Sorrow, a sunlit rectangle of water where I wept at the shallow end, pressed against the concrete like a man sentenced to purgatory via chlorination. Beside me sat a black labrador, nameless but noble, whose soft howls echoed my despair. I stroked his damp fur. He leaned into my touch. We were two abandoned souls, bound by melancholy and mutual need.

    Something changed. Maybe it was the dog’s quiet loyalty, or the absurd beauty of the moment. I returned to bodybuilding with manic fervor and resumed clean eating as if redemption could be measured in grams of protein. My body sculpted itself back into its mythic prime, and soon I was posing poolside in black-and-white glamour shots—oiled up like a Greek statue, grinning with an almost religious clarity. The dog watched my transformation with admiration, tail thumping like a metronome of approval.

    Now that I looked like a well-oiled demigod, I needed to promote myself. I searched the streets of San Francisco for an influencer. I found him in a San Francisco alley behind a velvet curtain. Tom Wizard. Pale, lanky, vaguely elfin, Tom agreed to help me make my photos go viral. But there was a catch. “You love the dog too much,” he warned. “Be more aloof.”

    Naturally, I did the opposite. I hugged the dog. Whispered sweet canine nothings. Called him my soulmate. Tom watched this display of defiance and smiled like a gatekeeper pleased with an unexpected answer.

    “You’ve passed the Dog Test,” he said, handing me two gifts. The first: a large, coral-orange Magic Towel, woven with healing properties. It could dry you off and erase your deepest psychological wounds. The second: admittance to a Harvard night class where I’d learn to wield the towel’s powers properly.

    Harvard, it turns out, was a dump. The class was run by Professor Kildare, a stout bureaucrat with the warmth of a refrigerator. He vanished often—wrapped up in legal issues—leaving the course in the calloused hands of three grad students who resembled hungover dockworkers. They smoked indoors, bickered about their failed marriages, and offered nothing resembling instruction.

    In that dimly lit classroom, I met a woman who looked exactly like Sutton Foster. She whispered that her eczema came from childhood trauma. I swore on my Magic Towel I’d cure her. She believed me. That was enough.

    One day, one of the grad students—Jimbo, a lemon-faced scowler in sun-bleached overalls—presented a radio. “Useless junk,” he said. “Dead as a doornail.”

    I stood, seized the radio, adjusted its telescopic antenna, and revealed its miraculous clarity. Music blared. Static disappeared. Everyone gawked like I’d just raised Lazarus with a dial.

    Jimbo lunged for it. I blocked him. “You had your chance,” I said. “This radio is mine now.”

    I flapped the Magic Towel with dramatic flair. A colossal truck, part semi, part spaceship, pulled up outside. Sutton and I climbed its twenty-foot ladder toward the cockpit. Jimbo and his cronies gave chase, but I yanked the ladder up behind us, sending them tumbling like sitcom villains. The truck roared to life.

    Sutton sat beside me, silent but radiant with hope. The Heavy-Duty Radio crackled softly behind us, the Magic Towel folded in my lap like a relic of prophecy. We barreled into the night. I didn’t know if I could cure her eczema or heal her past, but I knew this: I had a truck, a towel, a miracle radio, and a mission. And sometimes, that’s enough.

  • Heaven, Apparently, Has a Library

    Heaven, Apparently, Has a Library

    A month ago, I dreamed I was already in heaven—which is to say, I was somewhere astonishing and didn’t realize it, because apparently that’s the human condition.

    It started in a classroom, naturally. I was teaching at a college that felt familiar but off—like a liberal arts Hogwarts or a Wes Anderson remake of Dead Poets Society. The students were unnervingly sharp. Not freshmen. These were postgrads of the soul—opinionated, caffeinated, and engaged with the material in ways that implied they’d actually done the reading.

    We were knee-deep in discussion when I glanced out the window and saw the rain falling—not pelting, but gliding, like silk scarves from the sky. I drifted for one moment. That was all Tim Miller needed.

    Tim, a student and part-time podcast prophet, seized the room like a man born to lecture. He told everyone to open the expensive blue textbook. The one I assigned. The one I had never read. I stared at the cover like it was an unfamiliar casserole I’d brought to a potluck. “What did you think?” I asked, bluffing. “It’s okay,” they said. The academic equivalent of a shrug at your own funeral. I nodded, defeated, and dismissed them early—a mercy for us all.

    Outside the door, a nearsighted colleague half my age pushed a convoy of book carts like a noble foot soldier. I offered help. He smiled, already finished. I was obsolete, politely.

    I wandered the campus like a ghost who hadn’t been told he was dead. Then I saw it: a green coffee mug I’d left behind earlier, now glowing like a sacred artifact on a forgotten table. I snatched it and jogged through the rain to the library. I placed it on a windowsill with reverence, and two librarians appeared—silent, reverent, stunned. I’d returned the Holy Mug. They smiled as if I’d cured blindness.

    Still raining. Still warm. Still beautiful. I pulled out my phone—also green, because apparently I was living inside an emerald dream. It was dusted with beach sand, and I wiped it down like it was a relic I wasn’t worthy to hold.

    I wasn’t driving. I never drove. Why ruin the moment? I walked. Five miles, barefoot, maybe. The rain was gentle, more sacrament than storm.

    Then, through the mist, I saw my home.

    Three pyramids, each one the size of a small mountain, woven from stone in purple and gold. They spiraled into the sky like something the gods forgot to take with them. I’ve always loved purple. It makes sense now. But the gold—that was new. I’ve spent a lifetime disliking gold. Too gaudy. Too Trump Tower. Too cheap. But this gold wasn’t decoration—it was divine. It pulsed. It whispered. It glowed like it remembered being forged in the heart of stars.

    And it hit me.

    I lived there. In that zigzagged trio of pyramids, tucked in the mist. It was mine. I’d always been there. Somehow, until that moment, I’d failed to see it.

    Then I woke up.

    No rain. No pyramids. Just me, blinking in the early gray, stunned by the feeling that I’d glimpsed something holy and managed to mistake it for Tuesday.

    And I wondered: How much of life am I sleepwalking through? What miracles have I mislabeled as mundane? What if heaven isn’t a reward but a frequency we forget to tune in?

  • Calories in a Dream Don’t Count: A Glutton’s Redemption Story

    Calories in a Dream Don’t Count: A Glutton’s Redemption Story

    Last night I dreamed myself into a surreal mashup of The Great British Bake Off, Yellowstone, and a calorie-induced nervous breakdown.

    It began at a retirement party for D, a former colleague who had apparently left academia behind to study gourmet pastry arts in Europe. Now reborn as a culinary goddess, she presided over a dining room that looked like it had been styled by a Michelin-starred fever dream: trays of deconstructed brownies arranged like abstract sculpture, sourdough donuts with the texture of warm clouds, cinnamon rolls coiled with existential menace, and a chocolate cake so dense it might have had its own gravitational field.

    In the corner sat a magical grand piano, humming with faint luminescence. I was meant to play it—perhaps to provide ambiance for the pastry rapture—but I never made it past the donuts. They called to me. I answered with both hands and minimal dignity.

    Mid-binge, I was struck with a bolt of dietary guilt. I remembered I had a dinner date with my wife at her best friend C’s house. Worse, it wasn’t just any dinner—it was a social obligation. I arrived in C’s oversized dining room to find the ghost of a party long gone. Tables were abandoned like an upscale Pompeii, the air buzzing with lazy flies circling over still-warm piles of food: chicken pot pies glowing under golden crusts, French dips bleeding delicious regret, carne asada tacos wafting guilt into the air, and blueberry pie with a lattice crust so precise it looked like it had been braided by angels.

    I ate. With one hand I fed myself; with the other, I held my phone to my ear, explaining the situation to my wife. She responded with calm detachment: “When you’re done, meet us in Montana.”

    Of course. Montana.

    I was then transported—no explanation needed, dream logic intact—to a bustling Montana restaurant. I wandered from table to table in search of my wife, passing clusters of archetypes: the Trust Fund Cowboy, the Patagonia-clad Nutrition Mystic, the Ex-Brooklyn Homesteader. They were deep in conversation about the social fault lines of modern Montana. At one table, a blonde woman lectured an enraptured audience. “There are only two kinds of people in Montana,” she declared. “Old-comers and New-comers. And the old-comers don’t want anyone else coming.”

    Enter my friend Mike—ex-Navy SEAL, tropical city-builder, and walking rebuttal to provincial snobbery. He appeared like the Deus ex Machina he is, still radiating heat from his last humanitarian war-zone operation.

    I turned to the blonde know-it-all. “Mike’s a new-comer,” I said, “but he built an entire city in the tropics in under forty-eight hours. Not only could he settle in Montana—he could govern the state.”

    Silence fell. Victory was mine.

    But before I could savor the moment, I was ambushed by a different horror: the specter of calories consumed. The desserts at D’s party, the savory gluttony at C’s—how much damage had I done? Had I ruined months of progress? Was I now one sourdough donut away from emotional collapse?

    And then I woke up. The sweat was real. The calories were not.

    Relief washed over me like cold Montana spring water. My body was intact. My diet undisturbed. I had survived the sugar apocalypse, and all of it—Mike, Montana, the magical brownies—had happened in the safe, consequence-free realm of REM sleep.

  • The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man
    by Jeff McMahon

    Jeff McMahon was supposed to be a titan—or so he believed. His father, a man so dominant he once stole McMahon’s future mother from none other than General John Shalikashvili with the cold-blooded finesse of a Komodo dragon, radiated command like a halogen lamp. In the long shadow of that military bearing, McMahon sought to carve out his own myth—one barbell at a time.

    As a competitive Olympic weightlifter and golden-era bodybuilder in the 1970s, McMahon sculpted not just muscle, but identity. He was a Greek statue in motion, a walking promise of masculine potential. But while others were flexing in the mirror, he was gasping for air in a high school locker room, undone not by physical strain, but by panic attacks, a Nabokov fixation, and a Kafkaesque obsession with grammar. This was not ascension to Mount Olympus. This was implosion.

    The Portrait of the Artist as a Sweaty Young Man is a semiautobiographical novel in two acts. The first unfolds in the sun-drenched, protein-soaked Bay Area of the 1970s, where McMahon trained alongside a tribe of emotionally stunted muscleheads. The second takes place decades later, when he emerges as a reluctant intellectual—still jacked, still haunted—teaching college writing in a desert town where ambition goes to die and office politics are played with knives.

    Told in the second person, the novel is both an interrogation and a darkly comic trial of McMahon’s younger self—a character he observes with a mix of horror, sympathy, and disbelief. This is not a story of triumph, but the brutally funny autopsy of one. With merciless wit and an eye for the absurd, McMahon dismantles the treacherous myth of transformation and the masculine delusion that biceps can shield one from existential despair.

    For Gen X and Boomer men raised on Schwarzenegger and Bukowski, now softening into middle age and Googling blood pressure medication, Sweaty Young Man punctures the performance-driven culture of the gym, the classroom, and the self-help aisle. What begins as a memoir of obsession and physicality ends as a meditation on identity, shame, nostalgia, and the slow, bewildering shift from symbol to person.

    This is McMahon’s offering to the younger man he once was—the sweaty, striving, half-mad lifter who believed that heroism could be bench-pressed. He was wrong. But he was trying.

    And that’s where the story begins.

  • Relevance or Death: The Watch Collector’s Dilemma

    Relevance or Death: The Watch Collector’s Dilemma

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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