Cinemorphosis

Tag: fiction

  • There Was No Final Visit

    There Was No Final Visit

    Last night I dreamed I was driving slowly down a long, sloping road on my way to an important appointment at a mysterious nightclub. I knew almost nothing about the place except that outside its entrance sat a haunted statue of an angry man, and that somehow I was required to present myself before him.

    As I descended the hill, another car shot past me at a reckless speed. I watched it accelerate and knew immediately what was going to happen. The driver lost control. The car veered off course and began flipping violently, metal striking pavement, the vehicle tumbling again and again before finally coming to rest in a mangled heap.

    I stopped and ran toward the wreckage.

    The injured man had recently been released from prison. Somehow I knew this without being told. He had already endured brutality, hunger, and dehydration during his confinement, and now the crash had added another layer of suffering. He was alive but in unbearable pain. I lifted him onto my shoulder and carried him toward a nearby house, although I had no idea who lived there or why I believed help could be found inside.

    Once through the door, instinct told me to take him into the living room.

    Above the fireplace was a large screen.

    It suddenly came alive.

    An old woman appeared, perhaps in her seventies. She had the unmistakable presence of a witch—not the theatrical kind with a pointed hat and broomstick, but something older and more disturbing, a woman whose authority seemed to precede explanation. She instructed me to bring the injured man closer.

    Then the boundary between the screen and the room dissolved.

    The witch somehow acquired a physical body behind the screen. She took the broken man to her breast and began nursing him. The scene was grotesque and maternal at once: an elderly supernatural woman feeding a battered former prisoner as if he were an enormous newborn. Yet I understood that he desperately needed what she was giving him. After prison, thirst, starvation, violence, and the crash, he was finally receiving nourishment.

    Satisfied that I had delivered him to someone capable of saving him, I left.

    My appointment remained.

    I continued down the road until I reached the nightclub. Outside, sitting on a bench like a malevolent sentry, was the statue of the angry man.

    He was waiting for me.

    The statue demanded something vital from inside my soul. Whatever he required could somehow be translated into a numerical code. Push-buttons were embedded in his chest, and I entered the sequence carefully, knowing that a mistake would provoke some unspeakable violence.

    The code worked.

    I was spared.

    Around me were other visitors who had apparently completed the same ritual. They too had surrendered whatever the statue required, entered their codes, and earned permission to proceed into the club. We were the survivors of an initiation none of us had chosen.

    But I felt no relief.

    Slowly, a far more terrible realization came over me. This was not my first visit. I had been here hundreds of times before. I had driven down this road, approached this nightclub, stood before this furious stone man, surrendered some essential fragment of myself, and punched the code into his chest over and over again.

    And I would have to keep doing it.

    There was no final visit. No graduation. No debt that could eventually be paid. I had mistaken repetition for progress. The ritual was permanent.

    I was condemned.

    My only consolation was the injured man. Whatever else this nightmare demanded of me, I had stopped on the road and helped another human being. I had carried him when he could no longer carry himself. Perhaps that small act of mercy meant something in a world governed by witches, haunted statues, secret codes, and compulsory rituals.

    Then another thought occurred to me.

    I had left the man with the witch.

    She had healed him. She had fed him. She had restored what prison and violence had taken away.

    But I had no idea what she intended to do with him once he was strong again.

  • Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    Be Kind to Linda: She’s Trapped in the Maze Too

    As you attempt to retire, you will eventually enter the bureaucratic labyrinth and submit yourself to its ritual humiliations: security codes, two-factor authentication, forgotten usernames, password requirements apparently derived from nuclear-launch protocols, contradictory menus, and websites whose navigation systems seem designed to ensure that no citizen ever reaches his intended destination. After enough exposure, you will feel anger rising inside you. Eventually, a human being will answer the telephone, and you will experience an almost irresistible urge to unload the entire accumulated grievance upon her.

    Don’t.

    This is the Misplaced Rage Fallacy: the tendency to direct your fury at the human being who answers the telephone rather than at the labyrinthine system that necessitated the telephone call. After forty-five minutes of authentication codes, password resets, automated voices, contradictory menus, and a website apparently designed by Kafka’s IT department, you finally reach Linda in Benefits and instinctively regard her as the architect of your suffering.

    She isn’t.

    Linda did not design the website. Linda did not decide that your password must contain twelve characters, one uppercase letter, one lowercase letter, two numbers, a hieroglyph, and the blood type of your maternal grandfather. Linda did not send the authentication code to a telephone number you haven’t used since the Obama administration. Linda did not create the seventeen-item telephone menu through which you wandered like a starving hiker lost in the Sierras.

    Linda is trapped in the maze too.

    She just has a headset.

    This brings you to a second discovery, the Institutional Humanity Paradox: the larger, colder, and more impenetrable an institution becomes, the more surprising it is to discover that it is populated by ordinary and frequently decent human beings. There can be a yawning disparity between the personality of a bureaucracy and the character of the people who work inside it. The website treats you like a suspicious package abandoned at airport security. The woman who eventually answers the telephone treats you like a human being.

    This happened to me with CalSTRS. I already had a username and password, dutifully preserved in my records, and naturally neither one worked. I entered them again, because one of the foundational beliefs of modern life is that typing the same rejected password a second time may cause the computer to reconsider its position. It did not. I called CalSTRS, entered the automated telephone labyrinth, requested a callback, and eventually heard the voice of an actual person from the technical-support department.

    She was wonderful.

    For twenty minutes, she stayed on the telephone while we reconstructed my digital identity. She explained that a new system introduced about a year earlier had rendered my previous credentials obsolete, which was comforting in the same way that learning your house key no longer works because someone replaced the house is comforting. Then she patiently escorted me through every miserable step required to establish a new account. She never became impatient. She never spoke to me in the singsong voice adults sometimes use with people who cannot locate the settings menu. She never suggested that the problem was obvious and that any reasonably evolved primate should have solved it without assistance. She was kind, competent, patient, and helpful.

    Eventually, she transferred me to another department so that I could arrange a Zoom appointment. There I encountered another pleasant woman who tried to find me an opening. Unfortunately, the appointments were booked for approximately six weeks. She suggested that I call again the following week and see whether something had opened.

    What was I supposed to do—blame her?

    She had not personally filled the calendar. She had not constructed a retirement system in which someone approaching retirement must schedule a meeting six weeks into the future to discuss how to stop working in the present. She was simply sitting at her desk, looking at the same overstuffed calendar I was confronting from the other end of the telephone.

    She was a cog in the machine, but she had not built the machine.

    This distinction matters. Being rude to the people who take your calls is not merely bad manners; it is strategically idiotic. You are punishing innocent people, alienating precisely those human beings who possess the knowledge necessary to rescue you, and burning emotional fuel you will desperately need during your next gladiatorial encounter with a retirement application.

    Save your rage for the proper target: the system.

    Be kind to Linda.

    Thank the technical-support representative who spends twenty minutes resurrecting your account. Be gracious to the benefits counselor who cannot manufacture an appointment that doesn’t exist. Remember that these people also have mortgages, families, passwords, insurance companies, malfunctioning websites, dental appointments, aging parents, and bureaucracies of their own. At five o’clock they remove their headsets and become civilians again, whereupon some other institution begins tormenting them.

    Never confuse the personality of an institution with the character of the people imprisoned inside it.

    And when you feel yourself reaching the point at which you might begin screaming at innocent strangers, close the laptop. Walk away from the battlefield. Have a healthy snack. Lie down for a restorative nap with your eyeshades and cucumber mask. Allow your nervous system to forget the existence of authentication codes.

    Tomorrow you can return refreshed in body and spirit.

  • The Acquisition Readiness Principle of Certain Watch Enthusiasts

    The Acquisition Readiness Principle of Certain Watch Enthusiasts

    Six months ago, I bought a G-Shock GW-6900 and quickly convinced myself that it wasn’t for me. I already owned two G-Shocks—the Frogman and the Rescue—and two, I decided, were enough. I had achieved that mythical state every watch collector claims to desire and almost none can tolerate: contentment.

    There was also the 6900 strap. It was just a little too short. Once I buckled the watch around my wrist, I had only two holes remaining. The watch fit perfectly well, but in the fevered jurisprudence of watch collecting, two unused holes constituted evidence for the prosecution.

    So I put the 6900 back in its box, requested a return from Amazon, drove to my local UPS Store, and rid myself of the offending object within ten minutes. I felt enormous relief. Order had been restored. I owned exactly two G-Shocks. The collection was disciplined, coherent, complete.

    Naturally, I then bought three more.

    Over the ensuing months, the Mudman GW-9500 arrived, followed by the Mudman G-9300 and the King GXW-56. My austere two-watch collection had swollen to five, and I happily rotated among them while apparently forgetting the solemn principles of restraint that had compelled me to return the 6900.

    Then, about a month ago, the 6900 began haunting me.

    I started looking at photographs. I read discussions. I watched videos. I studied that strange face with its three circular indicators staring back at me like the instrument panel of a tiny Cold War submarine. Enthusiasts call the GW-6900 “The Three-Eyed Monster,” which is a perfectly good nickname. I prefer my own: the Triclops.

    Soon the Triclops was everywhere. I couldn’t get it out of my mind. The watch I had dispatched to UPS with the efficiency of a man returning a defective toaster had somehow acquired an aura in its absence.

    So I bought it again.

    It is now in transit and should arrive in a few days.

    I don’t remember whether the first GW-6900 I owned was the older version with the greenish electroluminescent backlight. I do know that the incoming watch is the newer GW-6900U-1, with its bright white LED. More important, I am strangely confident that this time I am going to connect with it.

    I’ve experienced this phenomenon before: a watch leaves me cold the first time and captivates me later, even though the watch itself has barely changed. Other collectors have experienced it too. It’s tempting to dismiss the whole business as fickleness. We buy something, reject it, romanticize it, and buy it again. From the outside, this resembles the behavior of someone who should have his credit card frozen inside a block of ice.

    But I think something more interesting is going on.

    Collectors like to imagine that our reactions reside entirely in the objects themselves. A watch either speaks to us or it doesn’t. The dimensions are right or wrong. The dial works or it doesn’t. The strap fits or it doesn’t. We behave as if we were laboratory instruments registering objective measurements.

    We’re not.

    Timing matters. Mood matters. The condition of the existing collection matters. Most of all, our willingness to admit another object into that collection matters. Sometimes we encounter the right watch at the wrong time.

    This is what I call the Acquisition Readiness Principle: the psychological state in which a collector becomes genuinely receptive to incorporating a new object into an established collection.

    The first time the GW-6900 arrived, I was defending the sufficiency of my Frogman and Rescue. I wanted a small collection. I was guarding my wrist rotation like a suburban homeowner defending his property line. The 6900 wasn’t merely another watch; it was an intruder. Its slightly short strap gave me the excuse I needed to evict it.

    Six months later, the watch is essentially the same. I am not.

    Now there is a vacancy waiting for the Triclops.

    This raises an obvious question: How can anyone possibly be “not ready” for a wristwatch?

    The question itself exposes the magnificent lunacy of the hobby. We don’t merely buy watches. We audition them. We assign them roles. We decide whether they overlap with existing members of the collection. We worry about whether they will receive enough wrist time. We speak of watches “connecting” with us, as though a 50-millimeter lump of resin containing a quartz module were an emotionally complicated rescue dog.

    A new watch therefore requires a certain receiving mode. We have to lower the drawbridge. We have to stop protecting the existing collection long enough to imagine another member belonging there. The object has not changed. The collector has.

    Does this sound nuts?

    Of course it does.

    The most honest watch enthusiasts have long since abandoned the pretense that this is an entirely rational hobby. But perhaps the watches aren’t making us crazy. We’re doing that perfectly well ourselves. We take harmless little machines designed to tell us the time and burden them with identity, nostalgia, status, memory, personality, tribal affiliation, and elaborate theories of Acquisition Readiness.

    Then we give the hobby a bad name.

    It’s one of the things we’re most proud of.

  • Sovereignty Erosion

    Sovereignty Erosion

    Last night I dreamed I had houseguests when a group of strangers, apparently Russian, simply entered my home. They didn’t knock, sneak in, or offer an explanation. They arrived with the serene entitlement of people checking into an Airbnb for which I had somehow misplaced the reservation.

    Within minutes they had colonized the place. They used the kitchen. They occupied the bathroom. They took showers. One man wandered around completely naked, his body covered with tattoos, apparently having concluded that sufficient quantities of ink constituted clothing.

    I ordered them to leave.

    They regarded this request as mildly inconvenient.

    I had to tell them several times before they finally gathered themselves and departed. Even then, there was no embarrassment, apology, or acknowledgment that commandeering a stranger’s house might represent a minor breach of etiquette. They walked out with the composure of airline passengers who had accidentally taken the wrong seats and moved only after I produced the boarding passes.

    A few hours later, they came back.

    Apparently my eviction had been interpreted not as a permanent revocation of access but as a temporary scheduling conflict. Once again, I had to order them out. Once again, they eventually complied with the weary patience of people humoring an unreasonable homeowner.

    Then another stranger appeared: a woman in her fifties making watch videos in my atrium. She had apparently identified my home as an excellent location for horological content creation. I told her to leave. She ignored me. I told her again. Nothing. By the fifth command, I was yelling. She finally departed reluctantly, as though I were the lunatic disrupting her production schedule.

    At this point, my houseguests told me to call the police.

    I retreated into a dark room and tried to dial the number. But my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I pressed the wrong numbers. I tried again. Wrong again. The simple act of operating a telephone had become an advanced neurological procedure. I knew exactly what I needed to do, yet the message from my brain seemed to lose voltage somewhere on its journey to my hands.

    My body felt like an electric car limping along with one percent battery: the machinery intact, the destination known, the accelerator pressed, but almost no current left to move the thing.

    Then my hands stopped working altogether.

    That was when irritation gave way to helplessness and finally despair. The strangers were almost beside the point. The true nightmare was discovering that ownership itself had become meaningless. The house was mine. The doors were mine. The rooms were mine. I possessed every legitimate claim to decide who entered and who left, yet my authority seemed to exist only insofar as other people voluntarily recognized it.

    I had entered a state of Sovereignty Erosion: the nightmare sensation of watching authority over one’s own territory gradually dissolve. You own the house. You issue the commands. You possess every legal and moral claim to the space. Yet strangers stroll through your kitchen, shower in your bathroom, film watch videos in your atrium, and behave as though your sovereignty were merely a suggestion awaiting their approval.

    The most frightening intruders, apparently, don’t break down the door.

    They walk through it and wonder why you’re making such a fuss.

  • The Rearview Great White

    The Rearview Great White

    This morning I drove my daughter and her friend from Torrance to Knott’s Berry Farm, a forty-minute journey that included the usual Southern California ritual of surrendering a portion of one’s life to the freeway.

    On the 91 East, I settled into the diamond lane and soon acquired a companion: a pearl-white Toyota Grand Highlander attached to my rear bumper.

    He stayed there for roughly twelve miles.

    I wasn’t crawling. The driver simply wanted to go faster, and apparently the laws of physics required that he communicate this desire by positioning several thousand pounds of Toyota close enough to inspect the stitching on my back seat.

    About five miles before the Beach Boulevard exit, traffic began slowing. I soon saw why. Two lanes to my right was a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

    Everyone underwent the customary freeway conversion.

    Brake lights appeared.

    Speedometers suddenly became objects of intense scholarly interest.

    Drivers who had been doing eighty-five seconds earlier discovered within themselves a deep and previously unsuspected commitment to public safety.

    The Grand Highlander, however, had apparently missed the announcement.

    He illegally crossed out of the diamond lane, accelerated past me, and continued charging ahead.

    I watched with fascination.

    Surely he’ll see the CHP.

    He didn’t.

    Surely he’ll slow down.

    He didn’t.

    Then he passed the patrol car.

    The CHP officer noticed him immediately.

    The cruiser pulled out.

    It moved behind the Highlander.

    And at that moment, the entire psychological structure of the freeway changed.

    The Highlander hit the brakes.

    Too late.

    The lights came on.

    This is what I call The Rearview Great White: that primitive surge of terror you experience when a police cruiser appears behind you with its lights flashing and you realize, after several desperate seconds of denial, that you are the intended meal.

    There is always that brief period of bargaining.

    Maybe he’s after somebody else.

    You change lanes.

    He changes lanes.

    Maybe he needs me to move aside.

    You move farther right.

    He follows.

    The fin is circling.

    Imagine swimming a hundred yards offshore at Redondo Beach and seeing the dorsal fin of a great white shark rise from the water behind you.

    That’s close enough.

    The Highlander driver, who moments earlier had been exercising dominion over the 91 Freeway, was now prey.

    I expected to feel some schadenfreude.

    I didn’t.

    Partly because I’ve driven more aggressively than I should have myself. Moral superiority becomes difficult when the prosecution has access to your own driving record.

    More importantly, I didn’t think his behavior quite deserved the emotional death penalty.

    On my personal Aggression Scale, I’d give him a six.

    Annoying? Absolutely.

    Reckless? Certainly.

    But I’ve seen eights and nines—the true freeway psychopaths who cross four lanes at ninety miles an hour as though auditioning for a role in Grand Theft Auto: Gardena.

    Had the Highlander been an eight, I might have enjoyed watching the CHP cruiser descend upon him like divine judgment.

    At six, I mostly felt sorry for him.

    I told my passengers that the poor guy was probably hyperventilating.

    Because seeing the lights is only the beginning.

    Now you have to pull over.

    This sounds easy until your nervous system has reverted to that of a gazelle being pursued across the Serengeti. You must find a safe location, activate the turn signal, change lanes, slow down, and demonstrate to the officer that you’re a stable citizen rather than someone about to flee the country.

    Then comes the roadside personality transformation.

    The aggressive driver disappears.

    The tailgater disappears.

    The man who fifteen seconds earlier regarded traffic laws as suggestions issued by lesser men is gone.

    In his place appears the most agreeable citizen in California.

    “Yes, Officer.”

    “Absolutely, Officer.”

    “Of course, Officer.”

    Meanwhile, his shirt is soaked through. His back is glued to the seat. His heart is trying to escape through his sternum.

    The Highlander followed the CHP cruiser down the offramp toward Knott’s Berry Farm, and I continued on my way.

    No triumph.

    No fist pump.

    Just sympathy for a man who had spent twelve miles imagining himself the predator.

    Then he looked in his rearview mirror.

    And saw the fin.

  • Breakfast Eschatology

    Breakfast Eschatology

    I no longer want to resolve my eschatological crisis.

    I don’t want to determine the nature of substitutionary atonement, theodicy, and eternity. I don’t want to debate whether hell is eternal, corrective, metaphorical, mistranslated, or the unfortunate product of several centuries of theologians getting overexcited. I’m tired of sifting through my epistemic crisis as though somewhere beneath a pile of Greek nouns I will finally uncover the laminated instruction sheet for the universe.

    I’ve also given up on perfection, physical, spiritual, and otherwise.

    What I really want is a good breakfast.

    Not breakfast at home. Home breakfast has its virtues, but it is essentially maintenance. Oatmeal. Yogurt. Berries. Protein. The nutritional equivalent of changing the oil.

    I want to go to a café.

    A good one.

    I want banana-nut French toast, buttermilk pancakes, poblano eggs Benedict, crisp potatoes, and a waitress approaching with a coffee pot before I’ve even noticed that my cup is half empty.

    More importantly, I want people. Lots of them.

    A true breakfast is communal. Certain movies become better when watched in a packed theater, where laughter moves through the audience like electricity. Breakfast works the same way.

    The lonely café is hell on earth.

    Three customers scattered across twenty empty tables. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. A laminated menu curling at the corners. Somewhere in the kitchen, a microwave beeps with the melancholy finality of a hospital monitor.

    Technically, breakfast is being served.

    Spiritually, the place is already closed.

    The packed café is another universe.

    You open the door and hear the glorious racket of human appetite. Forks strike plates. Coffee cups land on saucers. Children negotiate syrup distribution. Servers weave between tables carrying platters of eggs and potatoes. The room smells of coffee, butter, toasted bread, maple syrup, and potatoes surrendering magnificently to the griddle.

    Every table is occupied.

    A line waits outside.

    This is not merely a restaurant.

    This is evidence.

    I call it Breakfast Eschatology: the abandonment of speculation about ultimate salvation in favor of recognizing modest intimations of heaven in the communal celebration of a magnificent breakfast.

    For years, I have worried about the Last Things.

    What happens after death?

    What is the nature of original sin?

    What are the rigors of postmortem salvation? 

    What did the Greek word aiōnios mean before two thousand years of theology climbed onto its back?

    At some point, the soul develops theological indigestion.

    Enough.

    Bring me the poblano eggs Benedict.

  • The Vanity Portal

    The Vanity Portal

    I have learned that something good can occasionally crawl out of an embarrassing place.

    For years, I have entertained a recurring fantasy so vainglorious that merely describing it makes me want to hide under a table. Yet somewhere inside this monument to my own magnificence, I discovered what I call The Vanity Portal: the strange passage through which a fantasy of being admired unexpectedly opens onto a sincere desire to become good.

    The fantasy takes me back to 1983. I am twenty years old again, working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, where I actually worked while attending college. But fantasy has renovated the premises. The wine bar now sits conveniently beside a grand piano, because apparently my unconscious has obtained an unlimited remodeling budget.

    I am not merely an employee.

    I am the entertainment.

    I even have a stage name:

    Lachyrmose.

    There is a ritual to my appearances.

    I am in the beer box, tearing apart cardboard cartons and doing the grubby work of a liquor-store employee, while customers at the wine bar begin demanding music.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    I make them wait.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    Eventually I emerge from the beer box looking like a survivor of industrial combat. Shreds of cardboard cling to my clothes. A sharp carton has scratched my face. My arms bear little cuts and bruises. I am exhausted.

    This is crucial to the fantasy.

    I cannot simply be a gifted pianist. That would be insufficiently magnificent. I must also be a working-class hero who has just finished wrestling cases of beer before casually sitting down at a grand piano and revealing the soul of Rachmaninoff.

    The customers grow quiet.

    Lachyrmose begins to play.

    Melancholy music fills the wine bar.

    On one particularly ambitious occasion, Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett happen to be sitting among the customers. They are staying at the nearby Claremont Hotel and have wandered into Jackson’s for a little wine and relaxation.

    Naturally, they are astonished.

    Who is this young man?

    Minutes ago he was dismantling beer cartons. Now he is producing music of heartbreaking beauty with a completely formed artistic voice. Gabriel and Hackett exchange glances. They understand immediately that they have stumbled upon some rare creature—a bruised liquor-store employee with the soul of a European composer.

    At this point the fantasy has become so narcissistic that it should probably require a permit.

    But then someone else enters it.

    A homeless woman.

    Unlike Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett, she comes from an actual memory.

    I remember seeing her near Jackson’s wearing a red wig she had apparently found in a dumpster. She stood before the reflective glass of a newspaper rack, admiring herself in her new acquisition. The wig was garish and artificial, but she looked at her reflection with pleasure. For a moment, this discarded object had given her something beautiful.

    In my fantasy, she joins the customers at the wine bar.

    I begin playing.

    She listens for a while and then falls asleep.

    The melancholy piano music washes over her as she dozes in her ridiculous red wig. Peter Gabriel listens. Steve Hackett listens. The wine drinkers listen. But gradually they cease to matter.

    When the recital ends, the woman wakes.

    She thanks me for the music.

    I give her a bag filled with deli sandwiches to take with her.

    Of course Gabriel and Hackett witness this too. My unconscious is not yet willing to surrender the production entirely. They were already impressed by my piano playing; now they discover that Lachyrmose is also a humanitarian.

    Apparently musical genius wasn’t enough.

    I required sainthood.

    But then the fantasy changes.

    The woman thanks me for the recital and the sandwiches, and I tell her that no thanks are necessary.

    It was an honor to play for her.

    And I mean it.

    That is the moment when I pass through The Vanity Portal.

    Something strange happens. The fantasy stops being entirely about admiration. Peter Gabriel disappears. Steve Hackett disappears. The wine bar disappears. Even Lachyrmose begins to disappear.

    There is only the woman in the red wig.

    And I love her.

    Not romantically. Not sentimentally. I feel an overwhelming tenderness toward this forgotten person who possesses nothing, who found a discarded wig and briefly admired herself in the glass of a newspaper rack.

    In the fantasy, I tell her that playing for her was an honor.

    But the tears aren’t imaginary.

    I am actually sitting at my piano, playing music and crying.

    This is what disturbs me about the fantasy and prevents me from dismissing it as mere narcissistic theater.

    I struggle with Christianity. I struggle with its doctrines, its claims about salvation, its diagnosis of the human condition, and the enormous theological machinery built around Jesus. I can argue with all of it.

    But in that moment at the piano, I experience something I can only describe as the love of Jesus.

    Not doctrine.

    Not theology.

    An impulse.

    The desire to look upon someone whom the world barely sees and regard serving her not as charity but as an honor.

    And suddenly my ridiculous fantasy has shown me something I didn’t know was there.

    I want to be good.

    I want a pure heart.

    Unfortunately, even my fantasy of purity arrives contaminated by vanity. I cannot simply feed a homeless woman. Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett must be sitting nearby taking notes. I cannot simply play the piano. I must emerge from the beer box bloodied by cardboard, sit before an awestruck audience, and reveal myself as Lachyrmose.

    The ego insists upon producing the show.

    But perhaps this is how The Vanity Portal works.

    We enter carrying our vanity, our fantasies, our desperate need to be admired. We imagine ourselves beautiful, talented, heroic, compassionate. The entire production may be absurd.

    Then, somewhere inside the performance, something genuine appears.

    The fantasy begins:

    Look at me.

    But if we’re fortunate, somewhere along the way another voice emerges:

    Look at her.

    And for a moment, we do.

  • 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.