Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • The Sandwich Test

    The Sandwich Test

    Late in my sixty-fourth year, I had a dream about getting old.

    Not dying. Not disease. Not falling down the stairs and being discovered three days later by a concerned Amazon driver. The dream was about something that frightens me more: remaining perfectly alive while becoming increasingly incompatible with the world.

    I was still a college writing professor, but the college had metastasized into an enormous city. I had offices scattered across campus, although “office” was a generous term. Some of my offices were hidden inside caves. Others were buried beneath rocks. Apparently, I had been teaching composition continuously through the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic eras.

    I was no longer Professor McMahon.

    I was Ancient Man.

    Students and faculty tolerated me with the peculiar tenderness people reserve for very old dogs and malfunctioning appliances they don’t quite have the heart to throw away. I was still technically employed. I still had classes to teach. I simply never made it to them.

    I was too busy looking for lunch.

    Eventually I wandered into a campus café and ordered a sandwich. Then came the moment that crystallized the entire dream.

    I didn’t know how to pay.

    Everyone else apparently understood the electronic payment system. There were screens, phones, apps, codes, invisible financial transmissions humming through the atmosphere. I stood before the cashier with the helpless expression of a Cro-Magnon man encountering an Apple Store.

    Finally, I opened my wallet.

    Inside, instead of dollar bills, was a wad of turkey cold cuts.

    This was my money.

    I handed the cashier several slices.

    She stared at them.

    Then she stared at me.

    For a moment, I could see her weighing her options: call security, summon a social worker, or simply accept that the ancient professor had reached the stage of life when deli meat constituted legal tender.

    She chose mercy.

    Suppressing her laughter, she accepted my turkey and made me a sandwich while her coworkers turned away so I wouldn’t see them shaking.

    This was The Sandwich Test: the moment when an ordinary transaction reveals that the world has quietly changed its operating system without consulting you.

    Every generation eventually takes it.

    One day you are a fully competent adult who understands how civilization works. Then you encounter a parking meter, QR code, authentication app, digital wallet, restaurant kiosk, or some other technological improvement designed to make life “easier,” and discover that apparently everyone received instructions except you.

    The young person behind the counter looks at you sympathetically.

    You reach for your wallet.

    Turkey.

    The humiliation goes deeper than technological incompetence. The Sandwich Test tells you that your currency—literal and metaphorical—is losing value.

    I had survived chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, online teaching, Canvas, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. This longevity gave me a certain prestige. People regarded me as one might regard a giant sequoia: ancient, impressive, and probably best left exactly where he is.

    At one point I encountered Florida A&M’s magnificent Marching 100 moving across campus. I followed them.

    Their music filled me with heavenly bliss. I wasn’t supposed to interfere with their rehearsal, but nobody threw me out. Ancient Man had privileges. If an elderly professor who had apparently been teaching since the Paleozoic wanted to trail behind the marching band, you let him.

    This was the contradiction of old age. I was ridiculous but venerable, obsolete but durable, invisible but somehow legendary. People humored me precisely because I had survived long enough to become an artifact.

    Yet I didn’t feel honored.

    I felt lonely.

    I thought of the larval souls of Hades, those spectral inhabitants of the underworld who retained consciousness without fully participating in life. That was the real terror of the dream: not that my body had failed but that the world had moved several feet away from me. I could still see it, hear it, walk through it.

    I just couldn’t quite enter it.

    Then I woke up.

    My muscles were sore from the previous day’s kettlebell workout. I lay there contemplating Ancient Man, wandering through geological time with his useless wallet stuffed with lunch meat.

    Then I got out of bed and headed for the exercise bike.

    The larval state could wait another day.

  • The Geekee Principle

    The Geekee Principle

    My first great love was not a person.

    It was a blanket.

    Its official name has long since been forgotten, but I christened it Geekee, a name that made perfect sense to a toddler and none whatsoever to anyone else. Geekee was once white satin. By the time I entered preschool, however, it had evolved into something that looked less like bedding than forensic evidence. It was stained, yellowed, threadbare, and perfumed with an aroma my parents described as “disgusting” and I regarded as the unmistakable scent of home.

    Geekee accompanied me everywhere.

    At bedtime I rubbed its frayed corners against my cheek or twisted one into my mouth, reenacting the long-forgotten comfort of infancy. Modern psychologists would probably call it a transitional object. I called it civilization.

    My parents, unfortunately, belonged to the Anti-Geekee Party.

    They insisted I was too old for it.

    “It stinks.”

    “It looks terrible.”

    “People are going to think we can’t afford another blanket.”

    They saw a filthy piece of cloth.

    I saw emotional life support.

    The debate continued until we moved from Florida to California.

    Somewhere along a lonely stretch of highway, my father executed one of the cleverest confidence schemes of my childhood.

    “Look!” he shouted through the windshield. “A baby alligator!”

    Naturally, I turned to the opposite window, searching the roadside for the tiny reptile.

    That was all the opening he needed.

    With the efficiency of a seasoned CIA operative disposing of classified documents, my father snatched Geekee from my hands, rolled down his window, and launched it into history.

    By the time I turned back around, Geekee had vanished.

    I was inconsolable.

    “Stop the car!” I screamed.

    “We have to go back!”

    My father remained perfectly calm.

    “The wind took it.”

    I refused to believe him.

    Then he delivered the lie that permanently transformed the story.

    “The baby alligator found Geekee.”

    I stopped crying.

    “He doesn’t have a mother,” my father explained. “He’s cold. He needs your blanket more than you do.”

    Children possess a remarkable willingness to believe impossible things, provided those things are morally satisfying.

    The image immediately formed in my mind: a lonely baby alligator wrapped snugly inside my beloved blanket somewhere beside the road, warm because of my sacrifice.

    My grief did not disappear.

    It changed direction.

    Instead of mourning what I had lost, I found myself quietly pleased that someone else had gained it.

    Looking back, I realize my father had stumbled upon what I now call The Geekee Principle: the recognition that we surrender our deepest childhood attachments most successfully when they are absorbed into a larger story of generosity, purpose, or love. We rarely outgrow comfort by force. We outgrow it by discovering something that matters more than our comfort.

    Simply telling me to “grow up” would have failed spectacularly.

    Children rarely surrender enchantment because adults lecture them about maturity.

    They surrender one enchantment only after being offered another.

    My father understood this instinctively.

    He did not replace Geekee with logic.

    He replaced it with compassion.

    Years later, I began noticing that adults possess their own versions of Geekee.

    Some clutch prestigious careers long after those careers have become prisons.

    Others cling to collections, political identities, social status, religious certainty, resentments, old romances, or carefully curated self-images that have ceased nourishing them years earlier.

    The object changes.

    The psychology does not.

    Every Geekee whispers the same promise:

    “Without me, you won’t be safe.”

    Sometimes it is true.

    Often it is merely familiar.

    Growth begins when we discover that the thing we cannot imagine living without may actually be preventing us from becoming the person we were meant to become.

    The tragedy is that adults rarely have fathers willing to invent baby alligators for them.

    Instead, life performs the theft itself.

    A layoff.

    A divorce.

    A diagnosis.

    A death.

    A market crash.

    The prized possession disappears through the window before we have time to tighten our grip.

    Only afterward do we ask whether the loss concealed an unexpected gift.

    I never saw Geekee again.

    Perhaps it landed in a ditch.

    Perhaps another motorist found it and wondered why someone had discarded what appeared to be the world’s saddest dishrag.

    Or perhaps, somewhere in the swamps of the Deep South, there once lived an unusually well-insulated baby alligator.

    At four years old, I believed that story completely.

    At sixty-four, I find myself believing something even stranger.

    The best lies are the ones that quietly tell the truth.

  • The Smart-Right Principle

    The Smart-Right Principle

    One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading assignment with nearly an hour to spare. Faced with that glorious stretch of unclaimed childhood time, I did what any aspiring future contributor to Mad Magazine might have done.

    I built a submarine.

    Not an actual submarine, of course. I drew an enormous one on a sheet of white construction paper, complete with rows of portholes. Every window framed a tiny character, and every character had something ridiculous to say.

    One man was making pancakes and inviting the crew to breakfast.

    A woman with curlers in her hair refused to leave her cabin because she wasn’t presentable.

    Another sailor complained that his cereal box had promised a free toy that was nowhere to be found.

    Someone couldn’t nap because everyone else was making too much noise.

    Another had a piece of apple peel wedged between his teeth and regarded this minor inconvenience as civilization’s greatest crisis.

    The submarine was less a military vessel than an underwater apartment complex populated entirely by neurotics.

    I loved it.

    I imagined myself one day writing and illustrating absurd little worlds where everyone took trivial problems with magnificent seriousness.

    Then Mrs. Eckhart stopped beside my desk.

    Her red bouffant seemed to rise another inch as she studied my masterpiece. Her eyebrows arched with the unmistakable expression adults reserve for children who have somehow managed to disappoint them in unusually creative ways.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my classroom?” she asked.

    “I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was just drawing quietly.”

    She ignored my explanation.

    Instead, she began reading the dialogue bubbles aloud in a voice dripping with sarcasm. The class erupted in laughter.

    My submarine, moments earlier the crown jewel of my artistic career, had become evidence in a public trial.

    Then came the sentence.

    “I want your parents to sign this.”

    She turned the paper over and wrote a note explaining that I had spent class drawing cartoons instead of doing schoolwork.

    That evening I presented the evidence to my father.

    He read the note.

    He looked at me.

    Then he sighed.

    “You pissed off your teacher.”

    “I don’t know why,” I protested. “I finished my work. I wasn’t bothering anybody.”

    “That doesn’t matter.”

    “I didn’t do anything wrong.”

    “You insulted her.”

    I stared at him.

    “I don’t understand.”

    He leaned back in his chair.

    “By finishing early and drawing cartoons, you told her her work wasn’t challenging enough.”

    “But I never said that.”

    “You didn’t have to.”

    “I wasn’t criticizing her.”

    “She thought you were.”

    I still resisted.

    “But I was right.”

    My father nodded.

    “Maybe.”

    Then he delivered one sentence I have remembered for more than half a century.

    “It’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    At ten years old, I found this profoundly irritating.

    “I thought they were the same thing.”

    “They aren’t.”

    He explained that technical correctness and practical wisdom often occupy different neighborhoods.

    Perhaps I had violated no classroom rule.

    Perhaps I had every right to draw after completing my assignment.

    None of that altered the outcome.

    My teacher felt disrespected.

    Once that happened, being right became largely irrelevant.

    Only years later did I understand that my father had given me a lesson far more valuable than any fifth-grade reading assignment.

    He had introduced me to The Smart-Right Principle: the recognition that factual correctness often matters less than the social intelligence required to achieve a constructive outcome. Winning the argument while damaging the relationship is rarely a genuine victory.

    Children naturally believe that justice consists of discovering who is objectively correct.

    Adults eventually discover that human beings seldom react to objective correctness.

    They react to perceived respect.

    Or disrespect.

    Intention often loses to interpretation.

    I intended nothing more inflammatory than entertaining myself after finishing my work.

    Mrs. Eckhart interpreted my drawing as a silent declaration that her assignment had failed to occupy me.

    Whether she was objectively right no longer mattered.

    Her perception became reality.

    I have watched this drama replay itself countless times throughout adulthood.

    Employees prove their managers wrong while destroying their careers.

    Husbands win arguments that cost them intimacy.

    Politicians deliver devastating rebuttals that persuade no one.

    Professors publicly expose weak reasoning while privately humiliating students who might otherwise have remained eager to learn.

    Every participant leaves convinced that truth prevailed.

    Usually only resentment does.

    The Smart-Right Principle does not ask us to abandon truth.

    It asks us to recognize that truth travels through relationships.

    People rarely remember whether you were technically correct.

    They remember how you made them feel while proving it.

    Ironically, my father never suggested that Mrs. Eckhart had behaved wisely.

    He simply understood something I did not.

    Life is not graded like a geometry proof.

    You do not receive full credit merely because your logic is impeccable.

    Human beings are not propositions.

    They are creatures of pride, dignity, insecurity, gratitude, vanity, and interpretation.

    Ignore those realities, and you may spend the rest of your life winning arguments while quietly losing people.

  • Soul Foreclosure

    Soul Foreclosure

    I recently dreamed that I committed an act of generosity so spectacularly foolish that it could only occur in a dream.

    A stranger down on his luck needed a car.

    I rented him mine.

    Not for an afternoon.

    For a week.

    When the week ended, the car was supposed to return.

    It didn’t.

    The rental agency proved as reachable as Atlantis. Every phone call dissolved into voicemail. Every inquiry disappeared beneath geological layers of paperwork. Somewhere inside an administrative labyrinth, my car had ceased being an automobile and become a bureaucratic rumor.

    At first I searched.

    Then I inquired.

    Eventually I surrendered.

    I began the strange process of constructing a life around the absence of something I had once considered indispensable.

    That was when the letters started arriving.

    Apparently my missing car had been abandoned in some restricted location, and because it remained there, I was responsible for an endless procession of fines. Whose property it occupied could not be determined. Every answer generated three new forms. Every digital trail branched into ten more dead ends. Bureaucracy reproduced like mold in a damp basement.

    No one could tell me where my car was.

    Everyone could tell me I owed more money.

    The dream became increasingly surreal.

    The car was gone.

    Yet it continued ruining my life.

    I woke with the uneasy conviction that the car had never been a car.

    It was something far more important.

    The dream reminded me of Thomas Dolby’s haunting 1982 song “One of Our Submarines,” in which loss lingers like an unanswered transmission from beneath dark water. Something precious has vanished. The silence becomes its own form of communication.

    That is exactly how the dream felt.

    Looking back, I think it illustrates what I call Soul Foreclosure: the unsettling conviction that something essential to one’s identity has quietly slipped beyond one’s reach, leaving behind an acute sense of incompleteness whose object cannot be clearly named.

    The dream never directly told me what had been lost.

    It merely allowed me to experience the loss.

    The missing car became the perfect symbol because a car is more than transportation. It carries us through the world. It grants direction, mobility, and agency. To lose it is to lose not merely a possession but the very instrument by which one moves toward the future.

    The bureaucratic nightmare only deepened the metaphor.

    The missing soul could not be recovered through diligence.

    Forms multiplied.

    Digital records contradicted one another.

    Every attempt at resolution produced another layer of confusion.

    The system itself had become the villain, a paper-pushing Minotaur guarding a labyrinth whose prize no one could locate.

    Perhaps that is why I woke with such melancholy.

    I wasn’t grieving a car.

    I was grieving the suspicion that somewhere along the journey through adulthood, paperwork, obligations, and the thousand administrative distractions of modern life, I had mislaid some vital part of myself.

    The truly unsettling part was not that I couldn’t find it.

    It was that life kept sending me invoices for its absence.

  • The Bad Apple Principle

    The Bad Apple Principle

    This morning, while swinging kettlebells in my garage, I listened to Larry Mantle’s AirTalk. The topic was dogs in restaurants, or more precisely, the small but talented minority of dog owners determined to convince the rest of us that civilization has been overrated.

    The complaints were familiar. Dogs licked strangers’ hands. Seemingly placid dogs lunged at smaller ones. Playful dogs darted under servers carrying trays of hot food. Then came the owners of “service dogs” who informed restaurant staff that the rules were for lesser mortals. Their pets, like minor royalty, possessed diplomatic immunity.

    I suspect more than ninety percent of dog owners are perfectly considerate. They keep their dogs under control, respect boundaries, and would never dream of turning a restaurant into an off-leash park.

    They are also irrelevant.

    Restaurants don’t write policies for them.

    They write policies for the other ten percent.

    That observation led me to a melancholy truth about institutions. Bureaucracies are not designed around our best behavior or even our typical behavior. They are designed around our worst behavior. They must assume that somewhere, someone will abuse every privilege, exploit every loophole, and confuse entitlement with freedom.

    That is The Bad Apple Principle: the misconduct of a small minority determines the restrictions imposed upon the responsible majority.

    The principle explains far more than dogs in restaurants. It explains airport security, locked toothpaste at CVS, liability waivers, plagiarism software, surveillance cameras, password requirements, and a thousand other bureaucratic irritations. Every rule we grumble about has a backstory, and that backstory almost always begins with someone who behaved just badly enough to make the rule inevitable.

    The idea reminded me of a book I devoured when I was ten: Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle. Ever since, I’ve had a weakness for elegant ideas distilled into memorable names.

    Naturally, I immediately imagined writing my own bestseller:

    The Bad Apple Principle: Why Good People Live by Bad People’s Rules.

    Then reality intruded.

    The entire thesis fits comfortably inside a single paragraph.

    Knowing the publishing industry, however, I’m sure a seasoned nonfiction writer could stretch it into fifteen brisk chapters, three airport interviews, a TED Talk, and a podcast tour. My contribution would simply be to wave wistfully from the sidelines, muttering, “Yes, but the title was mine.”

  • Nothing Gets Better

    Nothing Gets Better

    Yesterday my piano tuner, Cecil, came by to work on my upright. He is pushing eighty, has spent a lifetime coaxing reluctant pianos back into harmony, and charges $250 for a tuning. I pay it gladly. When someone has become the best in the business, you stop thinking about the fee and start thinking about the privilege.

    After he finished, we lingered and talked about Southern California.

    I told him that whenever I return to my old stomping grounds in the Bay Area, I leave with the same impression: everything feels more crowded, more hurried, more stressful, and somehow less hospitable than I remember. The roads seem angrier. The neighborhoods seem denser. Even the air feels impatient.

    Without the slightest hesitation, Cecil smiled and delivered a sentence that landed with the force of an ancient proverb.

    “Nothing gets better.”

    The words settled over me like a truth I had always known but kept forgetting.

    Nothing gets better.

    Cecil continued. Torrance, he predicted, will eventually resemble West Los Angeles. Massive apartment complexes are already rising near our neighborhood. Del Amo Fashion Center has become a preview of the future. Try finding a parking space after eleven o’clock on a weekday. On weekends, don’t bother. The future has already begun circling the parking lot.

    Yet Cecil wasn’t complaining.

    That is the crucial distinction.

    His observation was not an invitation to pessimism but to realism.

    Most of our unhappiness comes from quietly assuming that the world ought to become more convenient, more orderly, more civilized, and less crowded as time marches on. When reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate, we conclude that something has gone terribly wrong.

    Perhaps nothing has gone wrong at all.

    Perhaps this is simply what civilizations do. They grow denser, noisier, more complicated, and more exhausting. Every technological advance solves one problem while inventing three new ones. Every improvement arrives carrying an invoice.

    I have come to think of this as the Cecil Principle: the recognition that the world rarely becomes simpler, quieter, or more civilized over time, requiring us to cultivate resilience rather than nostalgia or utopian expectation.

    The Cecil Principle reminded me of psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who reduces life to three unavoidable realities: pain, uncertainty, and constant work. According to Stutz, psychological health begins not by escaping these conditions but by accepting them. The fantasy that life should become comfortable is itself the source of much unnecessary suffering.

    Cecil, with considerably fewer words, had arrived at the same destination.

    Nothing gets better.

    Strangely, there is liberation in that sentence. Once I stop expecting history to reward me with perpetual improvement, I become less resentful when it doesn’t. I stop waiting for the perfect city, the perfect traffic pattern, the perfect political climate, or the perfect era. I become more attentive to the quiet pleasures still available: a well-tuned piano, an honest conversation, a competent craftsman who has spent decades mastering his trade.

    Nothing gets better.

    Oddly enough, accepting that fact makes life better.

    The truth, after all, has an unexpected habit of setting us free.

  • Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    One morning I sat at the piano while my wife prepared her breakfast—a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stovetop. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was four years old again, carried backward in time 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 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.

    Perhaps our religious impulse is nothing more—and nothing less—than that incurable longing to return there.

  • The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    Jeremy lives in Louisiana, but over the past decade he and I have shared the peculiar fraternity that develops among people who have spent far too much time thinking about watches. He has followed my YouTube channel long enough to witness my latest affliction unfold in real time.

    It began six months ago with a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    Then came the Rescue GW-7900.

    Soon afterward I was fully initiated into the cult of Multiband-6. Every night while I slept, invisible radio signals synchronized my watches to atomic clocks, and every morning I awoke to the intoxicating certainty that the digits on my wrist displayed the exact time—not approximately, not close enough, but the precise time.

    Jeremy watched this transformation with sympathy until he made the fatal mistake of buying a few Multiband-6 G-Shocks himself.

    Recently he wrote to confess that his own hobby had entered a state of upheaval.

    Not ruined.

    Upended.

    He had contracted the same addiction.

    Like me, he had become enslaved to the quiet pleasure of glancing at a digital display that never needed correction. Like me, he found himself staring at mechanical divers worth several thousand dollars and struggling to justify putting them on his wrist. His collection, like mine, had suffered what I call The Great Divide.

    Mine is specifically the G-Shock–Seiko Divide.

    Jeremy’s divide is somewhat different. His luxury mechanical pieces wear both Swiss passports and Japanese ones, but the conflict is identical.

    Two incompatible ideas of what a watch should be now compete for the same wrist.

    Ironically, this essay began as something far more trivial.

    I intended to make a YouTube video reviewing my Seiko divers on Divecore Waffle straps made from Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. Three of my twenty-millimeter Divecore Waffles currently adorn my Seiko SLA055, SLA051, and SLA023. My SBDC203 remains on its original Seiko “Chocolate Bar” rubber strap, while my Seiko Tuna SBBN049 wears a twenty-two-millimeter Divecore Waffle.

    I genuinely miss my Divecore FKM HP straps. They were magnificent. Yet the lingering discussion surrounding PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” associated with fluorinated materials—finally persuaded me that they were an unnecessary source of anxiety. My suspicion is that the straps are probably harmless. But “probably harmless” is an awkward companion for something strapped to your skin every day. Why carry even a hypothetical worry when the Divecore Waffles are every bit as handsome?

    I had planned to spend twenty minutes discussing rubber straps.

    Then I stopped myself.

    Who cares about straps?

    I already made peace with abandoning steel bracelets years ago.

    The straps weren’t the story.

    The story was that I had reached a point where every glance at my watch box required choosing between two entirely different philosophies.

    My Seikos are objects of astonishing beauty.

    Their dials possess depth, warmth, texture, and craftsmanship that industrial resin can never hope to imitate. On today’s used market my five Seiko divers are probably worth around nine thousand dollars. They are miniature works of art.

    My G-Shocks, by contrast, are worth perhaps a thousand dollars altogether.

    They are molded from industrial resin.

    They resemble equipment more than jewelry.

    They synchronize themselves every night.

    They weigh almost nothing.

    They display the exact time in large, unapologetic digits.

    They ask nothing of me.

    The Seikos appeal to my aesthetic imagination.

    The G-Shocks satisfy my practical mind.

    Guess which one wins about ninety percent of the time.

    It would be easy to write one of those tiresome minimalist sermons declaring that I should have skipped expensive mechanical watches altogether and bought only affordable G-Shocks. Such hindsight is wonderfully economical because it edits out the actual life that was lived.

    For more than twenty years I sowed my horological oats among mechanical watches.

    There was obsession.

    There was ecstasy.

    There was irrationality.

    There was financial excess.

    There was genuine beauty.

    There was hard-earned knowledge.

    Without those decades, I would never appreciate the peculiar satisfaction of glancing at a Mudman GW-9500 and knowing that the time displayed is as accurate as physics presently allows.

    Counterfactual histories are comforting fantasies. They allow us to imagine that wisdom could have arrived without tuition.

    It cannot.

    An hour before writing this, I was wearing my beloved Seiko Uemura. I admired its magnificent dial, then found myself squinting to determine the approximate time.

    Approximate.

    A few moments later I quietly removed it and fastened the Mudman to my wrist.

    Jeremy understands exactly why.

    My suspicion is that thousands of other watch enthusiasts do as well. Once you’ve crossed the Great Divide, you never entirely return. The two worlds continue to coexist, each beautiful in its own way, while your wrist quietly votes for only one.

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Ghost at the End of My Block

    The Ghost at the End of My Block

    An unkempt, unemployed man in his sixties—I’ll call him D—lives on my street. He is painfully thin, wears a beard that seems less grown than surrendered to, and carries the thousand-yard stare of someone who has spent too many years trapped inside his own mind. He is the neighborhood’s resident ghost, the subject of whispered conversations held over hedges and driveways whenever his name comes up.

    I rarely see him anymore.

    With each passing year he seems to retreat another step from the world. According to my neighbors, he now walks his dog only after dark, as if daylight itself has become an adversary.

    The last time we spoke was more than a decade ago. He told me his mother had emigrated from Ukraine. She was still alive then but has since passed away. He admitted he struggled with clinical depression. Once upon a time he earned his living in real estate. He loved photography. He struck me as intelligent, thoughtful, even pleasant. Nothing about him suggested the caricature of the neighborhood eccentric.

    Depression, however, is not content merely to inhabit a person. Given enough years, it colonizes the landscape around him.

    D’s house looks less like a residence than a psychological self-portrait.

    Weeds have risen high enough to conceal much of the property, swallowing the front yard as if nature were quietly reclaiming it. Enormous rocks lie scattered across the lot—not arranged with the intention of landscaping but dumped haphazardly, as though an avalanche had paused just long enough to empty its pockets. A rusted car sits permanently marooned in the driveway, stripped of its engine, one of those eternal restoration projects that never progresses beyond the fantasy stage.

    Then there is the roof.

    Or rather, the absence of one.

    Instead of shingles, enormous black tarps have been stretched across the house like bandages wrapped around a wound too deep to heal. The place resembles less a home than a disaster site awaiting inspectors who never arrive.

    The neighbors tell me D has owned five yellow Labrador retrievers over the past twenty-five years.

    Each one has had exactly the same name.

    Reggie.

    Perhaps it is sentiment. Perhaps ritual. Or perhaps depression dislikes novelty and prefers the comforting illusion that nothing essential has changed.

    Reggie, unfortunately, is also a source of neighborhood diplomacy. D has a habit of letting him roam unleashed, which periodically inspires shouted exchanges with nearby homeowners who are less enchanted by canine freedom than D appears to be.

    Recently, the family next door began an ambitious renovation. They moved out for a year while contractors demolished and rebuilt much of their home at a cost north of half a million dollars.

    During one conversation, one of the neighbors revealed something I had never considered.

    The tarps.

    They aren’t merely ugly.

    They are loud.

    Every windy night they snap, crack, and whip against the roof structure with relentless fury, sounding less like construction material than a chorus of agitated ghosts auditioning for Poltergeist. Sleep becomes impossible.

    So the neighbors arrived at a remarkably practical conclusion.

    Since they were already spending roughly $600,000 rebuilding their own home, they decided to buy D a new roof.

    The cost?

    About $20,000.

    It is an act of generosity, certainly.

    It is also an investment in uninterrupted sleep.

    When you’ve already committed well over half a million dollars to creating your dream home, another twenty thousand begins to look less like charity than an effective noise-canceling device.

    Every neighborhood, it seems, has its own D.

    There is always one house that refuses to cooperate with the local mythology of upward mobility. Every freshly painted facade, every manicured lawn, every luxury SUV in the driveway quietly tells a story of competence, prosperity, and orderly lives. Then there is the one property that interrupts the narrative like an uncomfortable footnote. It reminds everyone that not every life can be renovated with quartz countertops, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a designer front door.

    Some houses broadcast success.

    Others testify to defeat.

    D’s house has become an architectural memoir of prolonged suffering, a place where depression has seeped from the mind into the soil, the weeds, the rusting car, and finally the roof itself.

    Replacing the tarps with shingles will not rewrite that story.

    A new roof cannot cure clinical depression. It cannot restore lost ambition, resurrect old dreams, or persuade a haunted man that tomorrow will be kinder than yesterday.

    But it can silence the ghosts.