Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • When Your Bodybuilding Past Still Haunts You

    When Your Bodybuilding Past Still Haunts You

    Last night I dreamed I was illegally transporting a piano.

    This was not a metaphorical illegality. It was a regulatory one. The kind involving helpers, permits, and fines. According to Dream Law, moving a piano required two assistants. I only had one. If caught, I’d be cited. Possibly shamed. I loaded the piano anyway—my beautiful, expensive ebony instrument—into the back of an open truck and drove it from the Bay Area to Southern California, white-knuckled and guilty, like a man smuggling contraband Chopin.

    I was living, temporarily, on a compound owned by a vaguely unsavory man. He was tall, pinch-faced, and always wore a blue suit, the uniform of people who know things you don’t want to know. He had the aura of a community fixer—part mentor, part hustler, part moral hazard. He gave me piano lessons, encouraged me to keep lifting weights, and introduced me to restaurants with the enthusiasm of someone laundering taste through generosity. 

    On the day I was supposed to leave, my anxiety peaked. Rain was coming. The piano sat exposed in the truck bed like a sacrificial offering. One good storm and the ebony would swell, crack, die. I panicked. The trickster waved it off. Go eat lunch, he said. By the time you’re done, the rain might stop. This was either sage advice or the kind of line uttered by men who profit from delay.

    I drove to a nearby restaurant. It was mobbed. People stood outside drinking champagne as if waiting for a table were a lifestyle choice. Inside, servers were popping bottles at a frantic pace—corks flying, foam spilling, the atmosphere halfway between celebration and collapse.

    Then I saw it.

    Mounted beside the menu was a massive poster advertising a local bodybuilding exhibition. And there I was. Not the man I am now. Not the sixty-four-year-old who qualifies for senior discounts and considers fiber intake a moral issue. This was me in my mid-twenties: thick, swollen, carved out of stubborn protein and vanity. A human monument to leg day. I was the marquee attraction.

    The trickster, it turned out, had signed me up to pose in a bodybuilding exhibition without telling me.

    How did he know I’d be staying long enough to star in this marquee event? How did he know the rain would delay me? How did he still have a photo of a body I no longer inhabited? 

    When the diners saw me standing outside, recognition rippled through the room. Glasses paused midair. Heads turned. Then applause broke out. Cheers. My name—my old name—chanted with conviction. I tried to explain. I gestured at my face, my posture, the subtle collapse of time. I wanted to tell them I wasn’t that man anymore. That I now stretch before standing. That I wake up injured. That my biggest competition is inflammation.

    They refused to listen.

    The cheering swallowed my protests. Reality bent. And I understood, I would be showing up to that exhibition—dragging with me a body, an identity, and a past I no longer owned, but which apparently still had bookings.

  • When a Strap Solved Everything—and Instagram Ruined It

    When a Strap Solved Everything—and Instagram Ruined It

    I don’t work for Divecore straps. I don’t have an affiliate link. I don’t even remember how I found them. They just appeared one day, like a cult recruiter with good posture. All I know is this: once I tried them, something clicked. The fit was right. The comfort was immediate. The look was honest. So I did what any rational watch obsessive does when he thinks he’s reached enlightenment—I stripped every watch off its bracelet, slapped on black or orange FKM Divecore straps, and declared myself finished.

    Done.
    Happy.
    At ease.

    That phrase—at ease—matters. A seven-watch collection, unified by one strap philosophy, felt merciful. There was no mental juggling, no wrist gouging from metal end links, no micro-adjustment rituals to accommodate the daily swelling and shrinking of my aging, temperamental wrist. The system was clean. Elegant. Humane. For once, the hobby felt like a hobby instead of a low-grade engineering problem.

    Then, in August of 2025, Instagram did what Instagram does best: it ruined my peace. Someone informed me—solemnly, heroically—that a study had been released about FKM straps and PFAS “forever chemicals.” The straps in the study were abused like props in a MythBusters episode—conditions so extreme they bore little resemblance to actual wrist life—but still. With plastic contamination already saturating the planet, did I really need to marinate my arteries in additional synthetic mystery?

    So off came the FKM. On went the “safe” alternatives: urethane, silicone, vulcanized rubber. They were… fine. Adequate. Technically acceptable. Emotionally inert. I wore them the way you eat airline chicken—without complaint, but without love. And yes, I feel compelled to say it again: I still don’t work for Divecore.

    Feeling vaguely bereaved, I did what many men do when they sense disorder: I tried to impose balance. I put stainless steel bracelets back on some heavy hitters. I even bought a gunmetal, monochromatic dive watch on a bracelet, as if symmetry itself could rescue me. I now had four watches on straps and four on bracelets. The collection looked fantastic. Museum-worthy. Spreadsheet-perfect.

    And yet—I was less happy.

    That’s when I recognized the familiar enemy: Cognitive Load Creep. The slow, insidious return of mental fatigue as the collection grows more complex. Straps versus bracelets. Balance logic. Adjustment rituals. The hobby quietly mutates into unpaid systems management. Every glance at the watch box now came with a background hum of decision-making. And whenever that hum gets loud enough, a voice appears.

    You lost the plot.

    And it’s right.

    The plot was never variety.
    The plot was never balance.
    The plot was happiness.

    Happiness, in the watch hobby, is hard to define—but it’s easy to identify its opposites: stress, obsession, second-guessing, wheel-spinning, FOMO anxiety, mental overload, and the constant sense that you’ve taken on more than you can metabolize. If your watches feel like a to-do list, something has gone wrong.

    I’m trying to learn from this chapter. I know, intellectually, that less really is more. I know stress is poison. I also know I have a flair for melodrama. I can turn a strap swap into a Greek tragedy. I pine. I brood. I catastrophize like an adolescent waiting for a love note reply that never comes. It’s embarrassing. It’s funny. And I’m certain I’m not alone. Watch people are wired this way—OCD-prone, sentimentally overloaded, forever narrating their own inner turmoil.

    So what’s next?

    I don’t know. There’s no blueprint. No masterplan. No illuminated exit sign pointing toward Horological Sanity. The best I can do is remain watch-agnostic, laugh at my own compulsions, and tell the truth about whatever move I make next—if I make one at all.

    The world, I assure you, is not holding its breath.

    But a fellow watch obsessive might be.

  • I Forgot the Song, But the Song Didn’t Forget Me

    I Forgot the Song, But the Song Didn’t Forget Me

    Last night I dreamed I was attending an English Department meeting held, for reasons no dream ever explains, in a recreation room with an adjoining outdoor patio. The setting suggested morale had once been a priority, sometime around 1987.

    Inside the rec room, my friend S pressed a pair of earbuds into my hand. They were attached—not metaphorically, but literally—to a CD, which already felt like an archaeological artifact.
    “Do you know this song?” she asked.

    The music was exquisite. Airy. Radiant. It carried that dangerous quality of being both unfamiliar and deeply known, as if it had once lived inside me and quietly moved out without leaving a forwarding address. I admitted I didn’t recognize it.

    She looked at me with the gentlest possible contempt.
    “You burned this for me ten years ago.”

    I felt properly humiliated. Not embarrassed—abased. As if I’d forgotten the name of a childhood friend or my own middle initial. Then she summoned the band’s leader the way dreams do—no door, no introduction, just a man appearing fully formed.

    He was in his late forties, courteous, faintly exhausted, with the posture of someone who has spent years loading gear into vans at 2 a.m. I apologized to him for not recognizing his work. I blamed streaming—how it turns music into sonic wallpaper, a perpetual ambient fog where nothing has to be remembered because everything is always available. In a fit of dream-piety, I vowed to delete every streaming account I owned and return to vinyl, to sacred listening, to LPs spinning on absurdly expensive turntables like a penitent monk.

    He nodded shyly, as if he’d heard this promise before, and vanished.

    The departmental meeting began outside on the patio, but I lingered inside the rec room instead. I changed into a swimsuit for reasons that felt urgent at the time. I ate snacks—salty, comforting, vaguely institutional—and watched my colleagues through the glass as they discussed the usual bullet points: outcomes, alignment, initiatives. I meant to join them. Truly. But the snacks induced a narcotic drowsiness, and I collapsed onto a yellow beanbag chair like a defeated child at a daycare center. I fell asleep.

    When I woke, the meeting was still going on.

    Wrapped in a towel over my bathing suit, I finally wandered outside. My younger colleagues informed me I needed to sign the attendance sheet to get my FLEX hours. Unfortunately, the sign-up sheet had already been placed in a wooden box and sent to Human Resources, which in dream logic felt ominous and final, like evidence sealed in a cold case.

    The secretary waved it off. She would “put me in the system.”

    I thanked her. The meeting droned on. Words floated by without meaning. And all I could think about was that music—its beauty, its ache, its brief visitation. And then, with a second, sharper jolt of recognition, I realized I had forgotten it again.

    The song.
    The band.

    Gone.

  • Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

    Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

    I should have known at thirteen that seventeen would be brutal. At thirteen, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was already circulating through the house like a prophecy. I liked the song well enough, but my mother loved it. It was her time machine back to high school—loneliness, rejection, the ache of not measuring up. More than once I watched her eyes fill as the song drifted out of our Panasonic portable radio. That was her loneliness anthem. I needed my own. Mine was “Watching and Waiting” by the Moody Blues—a song for someone alone in the dark who senses there is something greater beyond himself and aches to make contact with it. Less teenage rejection, more metaphysical hunger.

    By seventeen, starting college, I was profoundly lonely. According to Erik Erikson, this is the stage defined by intimacy versus isolation, and I was losing badly. I felt it in my bones as a socially maladroit bodybuilder shuffling through classes by day and working nights as a bouncer at a teen disco called Maverick’s in San Ramon. Picture it: me at the door, arms crossed, watching a parade of thrill-seekers gyrate, flirt, and dissolve into noise. The job didn’t cure my loneliness; it distilled it. I was close enough to touch the crowd and miles away from belonging to it.

    One morning after a late shift, I dreamed I was living in the Stone Age. I was alone in a cave, wrapped in animal skins, stepping out into a gray, indifferent sky. I raised my arms toward the clouds, reaching for something—anything—that might answer me. In the background, “Watching and Waiting” played like a prayer I hadn’t yet learned how to pray. The dream was sad and beautiful, which felt like progress. As Kierkegaard noted, despair’s worst form is not knowing you’re in it. At least I knew. And as the Psalmist understood long before therapy existed, grace tends to follow sorrow once the sorrow has been fully felt.

    People hate being alone. They’ll sit through ads on YouTube rather than listen ad-free on Spotify because YouTube lets them comment, scroll, argue, agree—experience the song with others. Solitude may be cleaner, but communion is warmer. Which brings me to watches. What is the watch hobby in isolation? Nothing. A watch on a deserted island is just a lump of steel keeping time for no one. The hobby exists only because a community animates it—supports it, debates it, sometimes overfeeds it. A watch on your wrist is a semiotic flare. It says something. Others read it. You read them back. That exchange is the point.

    This is what I mean by Horological Communion: the quiet fellowship formed when watches are not hoarded as private trophies but offered as shared symbols. Meaning emerges only when the object is seen, recognized, and answered—at meetups, in forums, in comment sections, across a knowing glance from one wrist to another. Without that communion, the watch is mute. It ticks, faithfully, but it says nothing at all.

  • The Watch Relapse Spectacle

    The Watch Relapse Spectacle

    Watch addicts eventually reach a terminal stage of torment: the moment when the hobby that once delivered pleasure produces only agitation. The rotation feels oppressive. The collection feels accusatory. At this point, the addict does what desperate cultures have always done—he invents a ritual.

    Surveying the landscape for deliverance, one inevitably recalls the 2014 viral fever dream known as the Ice Bucket Challenge. The watch world demands its own purgative spectacle. Enter the One-Watch Challenge.

    The ritual is simple and public. A ten-minute YouTube video is required. The setting must be tasteful—backyard at golden hour or living room with flattering light. Friends gather. Straws are drawn. Every watch in the collection is claimed except the one the addict secretly hopes will remain. The winners strap on their spoils, grinning like looters at the fall of a city. The subject is then lifted into the air, victorious yet emptied, holding aloft his single remaining watch.

    He is reborn. He is no longer a collector. He is a Oner—a new creature who has renounced rotation days for the austere monogamy of one watch, worn for the rest of his natural life. He speaks of clarity. He speaks of peace. He uploads the video and waits for absolution.

    Naturally, the movement does not end there.

    A counter-genre soon emerges: the Relapser. These videos document former Oners discovered months later, sprawled on their carpets amid a shameful abundance of watches. Boxes are open. Straps are tangled. The men appear undone—glassy-eyed, infantile, muttering references to limited editions and “just one more.” The videos are initially consumed as comedy, shared with a wink and a laugh.

    Over time, the laughter fades.

    The genre acquires a formal name: the Watch Relapse Spectacle—the inevitable counter-ritual in which renunciation collapses into excess. What began as entertainment hardens into parable. For the first time, the wider public glimpses the pathology beneath the polish. The madness is no longer charming. It is instructive.

  • 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.

  • Overthinking Puts You in the Way of Enjoying Your Watch Hobby

    Overthinking Puts You in the Way of Enjoying Your Watch Hobby

    I’m trying not to get in the way of enjoying my watch hobby. Let me restate that, because it sounds absurd even as I say it: I’m attempting to stop sabotaging my own pleasure in a hobby I genuinely love. I’m trying to step aside so I can simply look at a watch and enjoy it like a normal human being.

    What’s the obstruction?

    Overthinking.

    Yes, I’m addicted to watches—but that’s a minor vice compared to my real dependency. I’m addicted to thinking about thinking. Overthinking is my true Grail, and it’s always in stock. The more I indulge it, the darker and more pessimistic my inner monologue becomes. I don’t pretend to have a cure for something that has been with me my entire life. I do, however, recognize the pattern.

    This goes back a long way.

    In 1967, I was five years old and anxious about lunch. When was it coming? Why wasn’t it here yet? My grandmother looked at me and said, “Jeff, you worry too much.” The moment she said it, a switch flipped. I wasn’t comforted. I was horrified. She was right. I did worry too much. And now I had something new to worry about: the fact that I worried too much.

    Congratulations, kid. You’ve unlocked the meta-anxiety level.

    I do the same thing with watches. I overthink my overthinking. I analyze my tendency to analyze. Then I wonder if that analysis itself is the problem. Before long, the joy drains out of something that should be simple: wearing a watch.

    Do I have a solution? Not really.

    What I do have is a strategy borrowed from a therapist I saw as a neurotic college student in the 1980s. His advice was disarmingly calm: when negative thoughts appear, don’t fight them. Don’t suppress them. Just notice them. Observe them as if they were weather passing through. No judgment. No panic. No dramatic counteroffensive.

    So that’s the plan. Observation without self-flagellation.

    This morning, for example, I strapped on the mighty Seiko Tuna SBBN049—on a bracelet, no less—and immediately my brain went to work. Is this watch too big? Too bold? Will I still be wearing a Tuna in my eighties? Will octogenarian me look ridiculous?

    The thoughts were stupid. They were also funny. And—most importantly—irrelevant. Rather than scolding myself, I watched the thoughts float by, labeled them mental debris, swept them out, and got on with my day.

    My oatmeal was excellent.
    My coffee was perfect.
    The Tuna looks fine on the wrist.

    Sometimes that’s enough.

  • The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

    The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

    We live in a Hot Take culture, and on balance, hot takes do more harm than good.

    For a decade, I feasted on them. Back when it was still called Twitter, my days were seasoned with sharp one-liners, instant judgments, and rhetorical mic drops. It felt bracing at first—intellectual espresso shots delivered in 280 characters. But over time, the feed stopped feeling like conversation and started feeling like a room full of people shouting clever insults at a fire.

    About a year ago, I deleted my account. By then, I barely recognized the people I once followed. Everything had gone shrill. Bombast replaced thought. Even the impressive hot takes—clever, ruthless, beautifully phrased—eventually blurred into something anesthetizing. A constant buzz that left me dull rather than informed.

    I didn’t quit social media entirely. What I actually want is boring, old-fashioned breaking news. Tell me what happened. Tell me where. Tell me when. I don’t need a verdict within thirty seconds. So now I drift through places like Threads, mostly lurking. Many of the smart people I used to follow migrated there. Some still do what they’ve always done: post headlines and context. Others can’t resist the gravitational pull of commentary. News first, hot take immediately after. Their allies cheer them on inside familiar silos, and the machine rewards escalation.

    To be fair, not everyone posting is chasing dopamine. Some journalists are doing real work. They have massive audiences and feel a genuine obligation to interpret chaos in real time. They live in a crucible of praise and abuse, applause and outrage. That kind of constant psychic weather can’t be healthy, but the motive is understandable—meaningful engagement. If this were a pre-digital era, they’d still be doing something similar, just with deadlines instead of feeds. Slower. Quieter. Possibly saner.

    But then there’s another species entirely: the professional Hot Taker.

    This person has mastered the form. Their posts are short, sharp, structurally elegant. A good hot take is witty, memorable, and instantly legible. It lands. It spreads. It racks up likes and reposts like a slot machine hitting cherries. Success is measurable, public, addictive.

    And that’s the trap.

    When identity and self-worth become tethered to engagement metrics, the self gets commodified. Everything becomes raw material for the next take. Nuance is a liability. Hesitation is death. The hot take demands boldness, outrage, and certainty—even when certainty is fraudulent.

    At that point, the Hot Taker is no longer responding to the world; they are farming it.

    I’ve watched thoughtful, decent people slide into this role. At first, their posts are useful. Then they overshare. Then they pick fights they don’t need to fight. Eventually, their online life becomes a series of skirmishes that feel exhausting even to sympathetic observers. They can’t stop—not because they’re evil, but because the machine has trained them well.

    So yes, we live in the Age of the Hot Take, where people measure their purpose by their ability to generate applause from the faithful. Hot takes don’t convert anyone. They delight the choir and enrage the opposition. Polarization intensifies. Nothing moves.

    Is it unfair to call this a disease? I don’t think so.

    First, there’s the hijack. The belief that constant expression equals relevance, that relevance equals worth. It’s a delusion reinforced by numbers. Likes don’t satisfy; they sharpen hunger.

    Then there are the consumers. By liking and reposting, they feel they’re participating in history, bending reality toward justice. In practice, they’re mostly helping tribes harden their borders. Everyone believes they’re weaponizing truth. No one notices the epistemic ground eroding beneath them.

    When COVID hit, I assumed the crisis would force clarity. Instead, it deepened the divide. Now measles—a disease we already solved—is making a comeback. Science, once the shared floor, has become another battlefield. If pandemics and preventable deaths can’t bring us together, hot takes certainly won’t.

    You can fire off the most righteous, viral condemnation imaginable. Measles will still spread.

    So what should we do instead?

    The answer isn’t attractive. Reality hasn’t hit hard enough yet. Historically, people abandon fantasy only when consequences become unavoidable. Until then, we chatter. We posture. We perform. Hot takes aren’t solutions. They’re symptoms—the chronic cough that tells you something deeper is wrong.

  • The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

    The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

    There is no such thing as an ultimate watch collection. That fantasy survives only in Instagram grids and forum signatures. In real life, your taste sharpens, clarifies, narrows—and that clarity does bring you closer to something satisfying. But it never brings closure.

    The problem is not the watches. The problem is us.

    We are capricious animals. One day we crave restraint; the next day we want spectacle. Nostalgia ambushes us and sends us chasing a watch tied to some earlier version of ourselves—college years, first job, first illusion of competence. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. A watch can be a time machine or a dead end.

    Then there’s money. Grail pieces often cost so much that they can’t be worn without anxiety. They live in safes, not on wrists. You admire them abstractly but never bond with them. On the other end, budget watches sometimes fail the respect test. You want to love them, but something feels compromised—finish, heft, presence. The relationship never quite takes.

    So if there is a destination, it isn’t perfection. It’s the sweet spot.

    The watch isn’t too small or too large. It isn’t priced so high that you fear it, or so low that you dismiss it. It isn’t dull, but it isn’t shouting either. You can look at it from different angles and keep finding reasons to linger. It holds your attention without demanding it.

    Some people chase that feeling through complexity. Chronographs seduce with their subdials and mechanical busyness. I tried that path. Instead of enchantment, I got sensory overload. Too much information. Too much pleading. I found myself longing for the blunt honesty of a diver.

    But even a diver has to earn its place.

    It needs salient features. Bold, but not desperate. Visually striking, but instantly legible. Purposeful without cosplay. The Seiko MM300 SLA023 comes to mind. It’s a legend in the Seiko lineup because it commits fully to its identity. Over 44mm wide. About 15mm thick. It doesn’t apologize. If you can carry those dimensions, it rewards you with gravitas and coherence.

    If you can’t, there are alternatives.

    The Seiko Alpinist SBDC209 is a different kind of seduction. At 39.5mm, it’s compact, refined, endlessly stare-able. You can live with it all day without fatigue. On the right wrist, it’s perfect. On mine, it disappears. And when a watch disappears, the answer is simple: no.

    That’s the truth most collectors avoid. The “ultimate” collection isn’t about consensus or rankings. It’s about proportion—between the watch and the wrist, between desire and restraint, between fantasy and daily life.

    You don’t arrive at it once.
    You circle it.
    And if you’re lucky, you pause there for a while.

  • The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

    Five mornings a week, I work out in my garage—kettlebells clanging, yoga mat unrolled, joints negotiating a ceasefire. The soundtrack is Larry Mantle on LAist 89.3 FM, broadcasting from Pasadena. This matters because Torrance is not Pasadena, and 89.3 is a notoriously fragile signal here. It fades, ghosts, sulks. Catching it cleanly is less a matter of tuning than of faith.

    Then there’s the noise. Torrance mornings are an industrial symphony: garbage trucks reversing, leaf blowers screaming like jet engines, lawnmowers revving, cars tearing past as if late for something existential. Any garage radio that can’t project authority is immediately demoted to paperweight.

    I briefly considered going big—dropping $300 on a Tecsun S-8800 field radio, a machine that looks like it should come with a government-issued lanyard. But after cycling a parade of smaller radios through the garage, I landed—almost sheepishly—on the Qodosen DX-286. And it has been an ambush.

    On FM, the Qodosen is a brute. It grabs 89.3 at full strength and refuses to let go. Its 3-watt speaker is loud without being cruel, present without being shrill. Placed in just the right corner of the garage, away from interference, it becomes a small, defiant monument to good engineering. Unfettered, it sings.

    The most embarrassing part is that I once returned it.

    I didn’t trust it. An $80 radio performing this well felt like a trick. Too good to be true. I convinced myself it was a short-lived overachiever—high performance, early death. So I sent it back and went crawling to my more expensive radios: the Tecsun PL-660, the PL-680. Fine machines. Respectable. And yet, one by one, they lost the FM battle and the speaker war.

    The absence of the Qodosen grew louder than the radios I owned.

    Eight months ago, I rebought it, tail between my legs. It has been my garage companion ever since. Morning after morning, it cuts through the din and delivers Larry Mantle like clockwork. Kettlebells swing. Downward dogs are held. The signal holds.

    Sometimes the best gear isn’t the one with the most gravitas or the highest price tag. Sometimes it’s the small, stubborn box you didn’t believe in—until it refused to be ignored.