Cinemorphosis

Tag: fitness

  • The No-Watch Zone

    The No-Watch Zone

    Since early adolescence, I’ve belonged to physical culture. Training, lifting, macro-counting, controlled breathing—the rituals took hold when I was twelve and never left. My sacred spaces are wherever the work happens: the gym, the garage, the office corner cleared for punishment and repair. In these places I move iron, swing kettlebells, grind through bike intervals, and fold myself into the severe calm of power yoga. This is the body’s economy—strain, recovery, repeat.

    But I live another life as well.

    I live the timepiece life.

    Throughout the week I rotate watches the way other people rotate shoes. A watch completes the uniform. Without it, the day feels unfinished, like leaving the house without a belt or a sense of purpose.

    Eventually, anyone who inhabits both worlds confronts the same question:
    What watch do you wear when you train?

    My answer: none.

    I have no interest in marinating a watch in sweat until it develops the bouquet of a gym towel abandoned in a locker since the Bush administration. Yes, I’ve entertained the fantasy—the rugged masculinity of crushing a workout while a G-Shock absorbs the shock and the glory. But the fantasy fades quickly.

    Training, for me, is a No-Watch Zone.

    I wear a watch all day. I sleep with one. At some point, the wrist deserves parole. It needs air. It needs to remember what unmonitored existence feels like. Naked skin against the barbell. No weight, no strap, no quiet reminder of identity, status, or time itself.

    The No-Watch Zone is less a practical rule than a philosophical boundary. Sweat, strain, and the sharp chemistry of effort belong to the body alone, not to the artifact. Inside this space, there is no curation, no aesthetic, no signaling. Only breath, effort, fatigue, and the small private victory of continuing.

    And something unexpected happens.

    When the workout ends—shower taken, pulse settled—the act of putting the watch back on feels ceremonial. The wrist returns to civilization. The object regains its presence. Absence restores its meaning.

    Constant wear dulls a watch.

    A little separation makes it matter again.

  • The Wrist That Ate the Workday

    The Wrist That Ate the Workday

    Working from home is supposed to be a privilege. Deliver the numbers, meet the deadlines, and you’re spared the slow death of freeway traffic and fluorescent lighting. Your company trusts you. Your productivity is tracked by a sleek little monitoring app that converts your workday into a tidy efficiency score.

    Unfortunately, your desk shares airspace with the enemy.

    The lacquered watch box sits there like a silent casino. You glance at the watch on your wrist. Nice. Solid choice. But what about the others? You lift the lid. A row of polished faces looks back at you—steel, lume, sapphire, promise. You’re supposed to be refining actuarial tables, tightening the language in your report, making sure the graphs don’t embarrass you in front of management.

    Instead, you swap.

    The new watch feels right. For three minutes.

    Then doubt creeps in. Maybe the diver was too heavy. Maybe the field watch better matches your “work-from-home professional” persona. Swap again. Back to the box. Another selection. Another micro-adjustment to your identity. Meanwhile, the cursor blinks on an unfinished paragraph, and your productivity score quietly bleeds out.

    You know the behavior is neurotic. You also know you’re waiting for a moment of revelation—for one watch to settle onto your wrist and announce, in a calm and authoritative voice, This is the one. The watches remain silent. So you keep rotating, chasing a verdict that never comes.

    What you have is Chrono-Proximity Compulsion.

    The disorder is simple: when your collection lives within eyesight, your brain enters a loop—check, compare, swap, repeat. Each decision feels minor, harmless, even rational. In aggregate, they shred your attention into chrome-plated confetti. The watches stop telling time and start interrupting it. Work hours dissolve into wrist experiments, each swap chasing a mythical state of alignment between object, mood, and self.

    The cure is drastic but effective.

    You remove the collection from the battlefield. Down to the basement it goes—sealed in a treasure trunk, out of sight, out of negotiation. No lineup. No options. No silent chorus asking to be chosen.

    On your wrist remains the G-Shock GW5000.

    It does not flatter you. It does not whisper about heritage, craftsmanship, or lifestyle. It does not ask to be admired or reconsidered. It delivers one message, blunt and unromantic: Get back to work.

    For the first time all day, the cursor moves.

    And the efficiency app finally has something to measure.

  • Six Months with a Torn Rotator Cuff and a Reality Check

    Six Months with a Torn Rotator Cuff and a Reality Check

    Six months ago, I didn’t tear my left rotator cuff in a moment of heroism or catastrophe. There was no dramatic pop, no cinematic collapse. This was a slow, quiet betrayal—the accumulated result of too many kettlebell sessions, too much weight, and too few rest days. Overtraining doesn’t announce itself. It keeps a ledger. One day the bill comes due.

    The injury delivered more than pain. It delivered anxiety. Every movement carried a whisper of threat: one wrong reach, one careless angle, and the shoulder might unzip itself. I moved cautiously, slept poorly, and began a small, private relationship with fear. I visited the doctor, the physical therapist, and the ultrasound technician. I chose the conservative path—no MRI, no surgery—just the long road of rehab: light weights, resistance bands, patience.

    Subjectively, the progress is real. Mobility has improved. Pain has eased. I’d estimate I’m about 70 percent back. But the injury has one cruel habit: the 3 a.m. wake-up call of throbbing pain. Lying still is the enemy of a damaged shoulder. Arthritis settles in like a squatter. The strange irony is that movement helps. Blood flow is medicine. A light workout often feels better than rest, which violates every instinct you have when something hurts.

    The questions, however, remain. If full mobility returns in a few months, will the nighttime arthritis fade, or is this now part of the landscape? When I’m “healed,” does that mean I can return to moderate kettlebell presses, or is the future a permanent treaty with lighter loads and humility? Injury has a way of rewriting your contract with ambition.

    My current training schedule reflects that renegotiation: two kettlebell sessions, two power yoga sessions, and two rounds a week on the Schwinn Airdyne—the machine I’ve come to call the Misery Machine. Kettlebells and yoga feel like disciplined bliss. The Airdyne feels like punishment administered by a research facility with questionable ethics. I’m less a human being and more of a lab rat. I don’t exercise on it so much as survive it.

    If the bike is the physical grind, the real psychological battle is food. I know what to eat. I actually crave healthy food. My staples read like a nutritionist’s love letter: buckwheat groats, steel-cut oats, chia, hemp, pumpkin seeds, molasses, soy milk. High protein. High magnesium. Clean and intentional.

    The problem isn’t what I eat. It’s how much—and why. Food is how my family connects. A couple nights a week means takeout. Mendocino Farms sandwiches that arrive with the caloric density of a small planet. Bread, desserts, shared indulgence. These moments feel like love, and they also keep me about thirty pounds heavier than I’d like to be.

    There’s a hard truth here that no diet book can soften: you can’t pursue food like a hobby and expect to look like a fitness model. Appetite has consequences. Pleasure has a price. At some point you stop negotiating with reality, make your choices, accept the outcome, and move forward without the luxury of self-pity.

    The shoulder, at least, is improving. Slowly. Imperfectly. But better.

  • Watch Hermit Mode

    Watch Hermit Mode

    At a certain point in the hobby, something subtle and irreversible happens: your internal rhythms begin to synchronize with the mechanical rhythms on your wrist. Time is no longer something you check; it is something you become. Welcome to Watch Hermit Mode—the state in which life is reorganized around precision, predictability, and the closed-loop efficiency of a well-regulated movement. The world outside is noisy, random, and inefficient. Your world is none of those things. Clothing becomes a uniform, routines run on fixed cycles, social invitations are flagged as system malfunctions, and discretionary hours are redirected toward higher-order maintenance: strap swaps, rotation optimization, wrist-time analytics, and the quiet satisfaction of knowing exactly how your collection is performing. Early mornings, early nights, and aggressive schedule defense are not quirks; they are operational strategy. What begins as efficiency slowly hardens into elective isolation. You are no longer merely wearing a machine. You are running its operating system.

    The symptoms appear gradually. First comes the 24-Hour Uniform Protocol. One outfit rules them all: sleep, gym, house, repeat. You go to bed in training shorts and a performance shirt, wake up in them, live in them, sweat in them, shower, and replace them with an identical specimen waiting like a spare part. Wardrobe changes are for amateurs and extroverts. You take quiet pride in your textile minimalism while lesser mortals stagger through multiple outfits a day like inefficient prototypes. Like a properly engineered movement, nothing in your system is ornamental. Every component has a function.

    Next comes the Saturday Night Diver Symposium. While your spouse and her friends are making custom concert signs for a desert music festival, you are at home performing strap swaps with surgical focus, refining a rotation calendar, and updating your annual wrist-time ledger. You know—without irony—that your Seiko Marine Master logged exactly 863 hours last year. This information feels important to you. It is less important to everyone else, who now watches you the way one observes a man who alphabetizes his spices by emotional significance.

    Your tolerance for human friction declines accordingly. Grocery shopping becomes a dawn operation conducted among the sleepwalking and the defeated. The early hour is not about convenience; it is about control. By the time the world wakes up, you have completed coffee, steel-cut oats, kettlebells, macro acquisition, and inventory storage. Bed at nine. Up at five. While the masses drift through their dreams, your system has already executed its morning cycle.

    The final stage is known domestically as Captain Cancel. Social plans are treated as hostile intrusions and neutralized with strategic intelligence: weather risks, parking deficiencies, epidemiological concerns, structural hazards, noise pollution, or the sudden discovery that a once-beloved comedian has not been funny since the Reagan administration. On the rare occasion you attend Taco Tuesday, you insert improvised ear protection, declare a medical issue, and Uber home to safety. The long-term result is operational peace. Invitations cease. The perimeter holds.

    If any of this feels familiar, the diagnosis is clear. You have optimized your life for accuracy, order, and solitude. The chaos of human variability has been replaced by the calm logic of regulated systems. In Watch Hermit Mode, you are not hiding from the world. You have engineered a better one—smaller, quieter, perfectly timed. The door is locked from the inside, the key discarded, and the movement is running beautifully.

  • Why I Bought the G-Shock Frogman

    Why I Bought the G-Shock Frogman

    If you’re buying the G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000-1JF, you need to abandon one illusion immediately: the fantasy that you are a solemn, high-minded “serious watch buyer.”

    Yes, the Frogman is a legitimate tool—ISO-rated, solar-powered, atomic-syncing, built like a bunker. It tracks tides. It handles world time. It could probably survive a minor meteor event.

    But let’s be honest.

    The Frogman is not a symbol of horological gravitas.
    It is a giant, unapologetic wrist toy.

    And that’s the point.

    This is not the watch of a restrained aesthete sipping espresso while discussing movement finishing. This is the watch of a twelve-year-old who never lost his appetite for adventure. The Frogman doesn’t whisper refinement. It shouts, Let’s go break something. It belongs just as comfortably on your wrist while you’re teaching rhetoric as it does while you’re wandering the house in gym shorts and a robe, pretending you might dive into the Pacific at any moment.

    So stop apologizing.

    Look at the thing. Smile.

    You’ve spent years marinating in the mythology of seriousness—heritage, prestige, restraint, the quiet dignity of brushed steel. Enough. Watches were never meant to be solemn artifacts of personal identity. They were meant to delight the eye, engage the hand, and give you a small surge of pleasure every time you check the time.

    What you’re practicing now is Gravitas Shedding—the psychological act of discarding the heavy costume of the “serious collector” and admitting a simple truth: if the hobby isn’t fun, it isn’t sustainable.

    Function still matters, of course. The watch should be well made, reliable, and usable. But once those boxes are checked, joy becomes the real criterion. The worst fate for any watch isn’t inadequacy—it’s boredom.

    Many enthusiasts have told me every collection needs at least one G-Shock for exactly this reason. A pressure valve. A reminder that watches don’t have to be precious.

    So after fifteen years of on-again, off-again longing, I finally did it.

    Last month I checked Sakura and saw the Frogman was out of stock. Prices on eBay were absurd. I assumed the window had closed. Case dismissed. Desire filed away.

    Then it reappeared.

    $440.
    $506 after shipping.

    Decision made.

    Now I have a new assignment: learn the dual-time function and actually use the thing when I travel. If I’m going to own a watch that can track the world, I might as well let it earn its keep.

    And I’ll admit it—I’m looking forward to the arrival more than I expected.

    I own beautiful mechanical divers. But when I picture myself in front of a classroom, talking about argument structure and logical fallacies, I don’t see a polished luxury piece on my wrist.

    I see the Frogman.

    Big. Black. Slightly ridiculous. Completely confident.

    Will it become my daily watch?
    Will it replace the others?
    Will it become my signature?

    That’s the experiment.

    The watch is on the way.

    We’ll see what happens.

  • Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, and Neither Was a Better Body

    Rome Wasn’t Built in a Day, and Neither Was a Better Body

    Five months into a rotator cuff injury, my left shoulder now runs a morning protest movement. Today it was particularly militant. The arthritis pain was so loud it drowned out my writing, which is saying something, because writing is usually where I go to escape pain, not negotiate with it.

    The solution, as usual, was humility. I picked up light dumbbells and did slow lateral raises—nothing heroic, nothing Instagram-worthy. Just enough movement to get blood into the joint and remind it that we are still partners, not enemies. The pain eased. Ibuprofen helped too, but I’ve learned the hard lesson: skip it for a day, let the inflammation throw a party, and it takes hours to evict the guests.

    Rotator cuff arthritis is a mechanical problem disguised as a moral one. When the joint isn’t tracking well, the socket gets irritated, and the irritation becomes inflammation. Night makes it worse. While you sleep, the synovial fluid thickens into something closer to cold syrup. Morning arrives, and the shoulder feels like a rusty hinge. The cure is movement—gentle, persistent, unglamorous movement. Every time I loosen it up, the joint forgives me a little.

    Training now looks less like conquest and more like diplomacy. Two kettlebell sessions a week, mostly lower body, with some shrugs and narrow-stance knee push-ups—just enough upper-body work to maintain function without provoking rebellion. Power yoga is back three days a week, a return to the early-2000s era of Bryan Kest and Rodney Yee, now supplemented by the Man Flow Yoga channel. I modify poses for the shoulder, but once I settle into the rhythm, the familiar state returns—the quiet, steady current of yoga flow. At this point, the mental repair may be more important than the physical.

    The Schwinn Airdyne—the Misery Machine—has been demoted to one day a week. Left unchecked, I turn cardio into a courtroom, constantly trying to beat yesterday’s calorie output. Competition with yourself sounds noble until it becomes another form of anxiety.

    Underneath all of this sits the larger ambition: weight loss through appetite discipline. Easier declared than achieved. Two nights ago I dreamed I wanted to be lean again but could only get there through GLP-1 drugs (which I’ve never taken). Such a dream is what your subconscious imagines when it has lost faith in your willpower. I’m hovering around 230—solid in a T-shirt, but without the narrower waist that signals to the world (and to my lab results) that discipline has the upper hand. For me, that line is about 210.

    Physical self-improvement is rarely about aesthetics alone. It’s an attempt to become the kind of person who can choose the long-term over the immediate—the kind of person who doesn’t negotiate with every craving. Discipline isn’t punishment. It’s the architecture of a calmer life.

    This question of belief came back to me while watching the documentary Queen of Chess, about Judit Polgar, who fought her way through a male-dominated chess world. Her advice was simple: you have to believe in yourself. The line landed harder than expected.

    But belief doesn’t arrive on command. If your history includes abandoned goals and broken dietary programs, confidence isn’t a mindset—it’s a construction project. It’s built the only way durable things are built: small wins, repeated often enough that the brain stops arguing.

    Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither is a shoulder. Neither is a waist. Neither is a self you trust.

  • My Rotator Cuff Injury Taught Me Patience and Restraint

    My Rotator Cuff Injury Taught Me Patience and Restraint

    I hesitate to say this out loud, for fear of angering whatever capricious deity oversees orthopedic recoveries, but my torn rotator cuff appears to have turned a corner.

    For the first time in five months, I’ve gone without ibuprofen. No chemical truce. No white tablets brokered between inflammation and denial. My range of motion has improved by more than sixty percent, and for two nights in a row I’ve slept without that familiar 4 a.m. arthritis ambush—just a bit of stiffness, the kind that registers as information rather than alarm.

    When discomfort does surface, I can quiet it with embarrassingly small interventions: lateral raises with a three-pound dumbbell, posterior-delt pulls using a resistance band anchored to a garage wall strut. Movements so light they feel like apologies. And yet—they work.

    Two weeks ago, an ultrasound revealed inflammatory fluid. The doctor promptly suggested the modern holy trinity: cortisone shot, MRI, and escalation. I declined all three. Why submit to a needle when the pain isn’t screaming? Why enter an MRI tube when claustrophobia turns it into a medieval punishment device? And why rush toward surgery when my rehab therapist, calm and unflappable, says I’ll heal just fine without it?

    So I stick with what got me here.

    Careful shoulder work. Kettlebell leg training. Trap shrugs. Slow, deliberate cleans. Reverse curls. Close-hand push-ups on my knees—humbling but honest. Anything that irritates the shoulder—dumbbell flyes, grand gestures, heroic nonsense—gets cut without appeal. I’ve become ruthless in the best way. No bargaining. No ego.

    Injury has a way of clarifying priorities. You don’t truly appreciate the orchestration of a whole body until one part goes rogue and holds the rest hostage. Healing teaches restraint. Progress rewards patience. And recovery, when it finally begins, feels less like triumph than like a quiet ceasefire—one you’re careful not to violate.

  • The Schwinn Airdyne and the Three Realms of Fitness

    The Schwinn Airdyne and the Three Realms of Fitness

    About fifteen years ago, the literary magazine Zyzzyva published one of my short stories, “Phittnut’s Progress.” It followed a workout addict who trained with the same manic devotion Martin Luther once applied to penance and self-flagellation. At the time, I thought I was being clever. In retrospect, I was being autobiographical.

    I’ve long understood exercise as a spiritual journey—less Peloton, more Dante. Every workout is a descent, an ascent, or, on rare days, a brief glimpse of paradise. I grasped this intuitively long before I had any formal exposure to theology.

    When I was about seven, I watched a 1960s TV show in which a man in a gorilla suit terrorized castaways on a nameless island. The production values were laughable; the fear was not. That night, the gorilla followed me to my room. I lay in bed convinced the beast was beneath my mattress, growling, reaching upward, eager to drag me into its lair.

    Sleep was impossible until I deployed my first metaphysical escape hatch. I imagined myself drifting on a raft along a calm river, safely beyond the monster’s reach. Above me stood a benevolent woman—a hybrid of the Statue of Liberty and Dante’s Beatrice—watching over my passage. Ahead was a luminous haze, the same gauzy heaven Fred Gwynne’s Patience the Guardian Angel inhabits in the 1969 film The Littlest Angel. Only then did peace return.

    This architecture still governs my workouts.

    When I’m out of shape, I’m back in the Monster’s Lair. When conditioning improves, I find myself floating along Beatrice’s River. And when I hit my goal—when effort dissolves into rhythm—I enter the Glory of Patience.

    My Schwinn Airdyne is the portal between these realms.

    Six months ago, my ambition was modest: 600 calories in 54 minutes. Respectable. Enough to keep the gorilla at bay. As fitness returned, so did ambition. A month ago, I raised the standard. To remain outside the inferno, I now needed 700 calories in roughly 55 minutes.

    Then reality intervened.

    Four days ago, after brutalizing my body with an ill-advised plumbing project, I plunged straight into the pit. Two days later, I slogged for 56 minutes and scraped together a humiliating 500 calories. Full inferno. The simian breathed hotly.

    Today, I clawed my way back to 603 calories in 54 minutes. Not glorious. Not close to the 810 calories I burned in 61 minutes six days ago. But it’s movement in the right direction. The river is visible again. The monster’s reach falls short.

    For now, that’s enough.

  • How a Toilet Seat Ruined My Workout

    How a Toilet Seat Ruined My Workout

    Eighteen months ago, when I tore my rotator cuff, I made the first of several reluctant concessions to age and anatomy. My one-hour kettlebell workouts dropped from five days a week to three. In their place, I resurrected the Schwinn Airdyne—a machine I trust because it does not care about my feelings. I rode it for 50 to 60 minutes, three or four days a week, and in the early going I had to work hard to burn 600 calories in 54 minutes. Progress came slowly, then grudgingly, then reliably. Soon it took only 48 minutes to hit 600. In the last month, I was regularly landing around 700 calories in 56 minutes.

    Then came yesterday.

    I burned 825 calories in 61 minutes. Nearly 800 calories per hour. That’s not training; that’s an episode. That’s one of those rare days when the body cooperates, the mind goes feral, and the machine quietly accepts its role as accomplice.

    But we need to talk about today.

    Today, I slogged. I crawled. I negotiated with myself minute by minute. I finished with a humiliating 500 calories in 56 minutes—a meager 535 calories per hour. That’s roughly a third less output than yesterday. As someone who motivates himself through numbers, benchmarks, and internal scorekeeping, this wasn’t just disappointing. It was existential.

    Gamification cuts both ways.

    There were, however, mitigating factors. Last night I spent three hours locked in mortal combat with an old toilet seat, sweating through three T-shirts while attempting to remove plastic wing nuts that had apparently fused with time itself. During this campaign, I punched myself in the face with a pair of pliers, opening a respectable gash across my nose. I woke up sore in places no exercise program claims credit for.

    I suspected today’s ride would be compromised. I just didn’t anticipate how compromised. Working out this morning after last night’s ordeal felt like an NFL linebacker playing Monday Night Football and then being asked to suit up again on Thursday night. The schedule was punitive. What I needed was rest—another full day of it.

    To console myself, I did what any reasonable person would do: I cooked the books. Surely that three-hour ordeal burned at least 400 calories. Add that to today’s 500 on the Airdyne and—there it is—900 calories. A full 200 calories over my goal.

    Victory.

    The ledger balances. My bragging rights are being processed. All that remains is a warm bathtub and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that even on an off day, I still managed to win the argument with myself.

  • While Others Fell in Love, I Was Benching

    While Others Fell in Love, I Was Benching

    In 1975, when I was fourteen and already grooming myself for eventual induction into the House of Schwarzenegger, I was struck with existential terror by an article in The San Francisco Chronicle. Futurists, it announced, were preparing us for the inevitable: Earth would soon be too crowded, too exhausted, too used up. Humanity would have to evacuate—via lunar shuttles—and establish solar-powered colonies in outer space.

    The article leaned heavily on the ideas of Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist whose vision would later crystallize in The High Frontier. We would live, he proposed, in “artificial, closed-ecology habitats in free orbit,” powered by vast solar arrays. Don Davis supplied illustrations: cottages, rolling green hills, fountains, happy citizens strolling through a weightless Eden that looked suspiciously like a New Age brochure for upscale suburbia.

    Then I noticed something horrifying.

    Everyone in the drawings was skinny. Not lean. Not athletic. Skinny in a faint, undernourished, anemic way. It dawned on me with the force of revelation: no gravity meant no resistance. No resistance meant no gyms. No iron. No pumping. My muscles would dissolve. I would become what I most feared—a tomato with toothpicks stuck into it, drifting through space in orthopedic sandals.

    A forced relocation to an orbital colony wouldn’t just end bodybuilding. It would end me.

    That moment revealed two durable truths about my character. First, I did not like change. Even minor disruptions—replacing stereo components, finding a new health club—felt borderline traumatic. The idea of being compelled to move to space was not exciting; it was annihilating. Second, bodybuilding wasn’t a hobby. It was a containment field. Anything that threatened it threatened my psychic infrastructure.

    This may explain why girls confused and frightened me.

    A few tried, valiantly, to breach my defenses. One was Mary Claybourne, a high school sophomore who had a very obvious crush on me. One afternoon at my locker, she handed me a birthday card. On the front it read: If It Feels Good, Do It! Inside, she had written a note inviting me to ask her out.

    I remember standing by a pillar near the courtyard, reading her card, while Mary sat at a picnic table with her friends, looking at me with naked hope. The look was unmistakable. She wanted me to stride across the concrete, tear open my street clothes, emerge in a cape, and sweep her into a romance worthy of daytime television.

    Instead, I stared at her beautiful eyes and thought only this: How can I possibly love this girl when civilization is on the brink of relocating to a gravity-free space colony where I won’t be able to bench press?

    The question was absurd. Knowing it was absurd did nothing to soften the dread.

    Looking back now, it’s clear I wasn’t ready for intimacy. Some teenagers arrive relatively intact, with enough internal coherence to connect to others without panic. I was not one of them. I was fragmented. Provisional. A self still under construction. I wasn’t merely a bodybuilder—I was a builder in the most literal sense. I had to assemble myself first. An embryo cannot date.

    And yet, I sometimes wonder if that’s a convenient story. Maybe I should have waded into the shallow end of teenage romance and learned to flail. Maybe sinking a little would have strengthened muscles bodybuilding couldn’t touch. Maybe the gym wasn’t just discipline—it was refuge. A retreat from the unpredictable demands of real life.

    What I know now is this: girls represented the same threat as space colonies. I liked them too much. I sensed that if I surrendered to romance, my monastic devotion to iron would falter. I had no talent for balance. If I served one master, I would resent the other.

    So, overwhelmed by choice, I chose the one world I could control.

    On Friday night, I did not date Mary Claybourne.

    I dated the bench press.