Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • Your Status Drifts Like the Waves of the Sea

    Your Status Drifts Like the Waves of the Sea

    One grim Tuesday in fifth grade, our entire class was herded into the nurse’s office for the Ishihara Colorblind Test—a bright little carnival of humiliation disguised as medical science. Each of us took turns peering into a glowing lens, where we were supposed to spot numbers hidden in a mosaic of pastel dots. My classmates breezed through like they were decoding divine messages. I, however, saw nothing but decorative oatmeal.

    The nurse grew impatient. “Can’t you see anything?” she barked, her voice slicing through the sterile air like a paper cut. The class erupted in laughter. My fate was sealed: I was the day’s designated leper, the monochrome freak in a Technicolor world.

    At lunch, I sat alone with my half-eaten cheeseburger and tater tots, brooding over my sudden fall from grace. “Why,” I asked my internal life coach, Master Po, “is everyone making such a big deal about me being colorblind?”

    “Do not worry, Grasshopper,” he said in that maddeningly tranquil voice. “Today you are mocked, but by tomorrow you will be first picked at kickball, for your mighty legs will send the ball over the fence. People’s judgments are like waves upon the sea—brief, noisy, and forgotten.”

    “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “Teddy Leidecker smelled like pee in kindergarten, and he’s still called Pee-pee Teddy. That wave’s been breaking for five years straight.”

    “Nature does not hurry,” Master Po said serenely, “yet everything is accomplished in its time.”

    “Try telling that to Teddy Leidecker,” I muttered.

    “You must not manage the gardens of others,” he said. “You have your own plot of weeds to clear.”

    “Really encouraging, Master.”

    He nodded. “You must clear them to reveal your original nature.”

    “What if my ‘original nature’ isn’t that great?”

    “Even if you dislike yourself,” he said, “you must nurture yourself. The sage helps even the repulsive.”

    “So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that even when I do stupid things, I can be a moral lesson to myself?”

    “Precisely, Grasshopper. You are blossoming before my eyes.”

    “Yeah,” I said, stabbing a tater tot. “Into what, exactly—a dandelion?”

  • Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    When I was ten, I made the catastrophic decision to watch an ABC Movie of the Week called The Screaming Woman, based on a Ray Bradbury short story. The premise was simple: a woman buried alive, screaming for help. But to a ten-year-old with an overactive imagination, it was psychological napalm. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind was the muffled plea of a mud-caked corpse clawing her way out from under my bed.

    One night, trembling in a sweat-damp cocoon of sheets, I turned to my imaginary Zen tormentor, Master Po, and asked, “Why am I so stupid, Master? Why did I watch a movie designed to murder my sleep?”

    “Ah, Grasshopper,” he said, with the unhurried calm of someone who’s never paid a utility bill, “the woman buried in a shallow grave is not your enemy. She is your teacher. She shows you the short bridge between life and death. You imagine the bridge as long, but in truth it is a nub, barely the length of a thought. Horror films remind you that you are always one bad turn from the dirt nap.”

    “That’s profound, Master, but I still can’t sleep.”

    “You mustn’t flee from the woman under your bed,” he said. “You must reach into the grave and pull her out. In saving her, you save yourself.”

    “I’m not going near a grave,” I said. “I have claustrophobia.”

    “Life and death,” he replied, “are the same thing seen from opposite sides of the same coin.”

    “I prefer the life side, thank you.”

    “You cling to your vantage point because you think it’s fixed,” he said, with the patience of a man lecturing a doorknob. “But it will shift. When you accept change, death will no longer frighten you—and once that fear is gone, nothing can stop you.”

    “Nothing? Like I could hit a baseball five hundred feet like Reggie Jackson?”

    Master Po sighed. “No, Grasshopper. You will stop wanting to be Reggie Jackson. And that will be your home run.”

  • It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

    It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

    Sitting in the classroom at Independent Elementary, I’d burned through Mrs. Eckhart’s reading questions and had an hour to kill, so I launched a silent mutiny on a sheet of white art paper. I drew a submarine the size of a small nation—portholes lined up like pearls, each framing a tiny soap opera. In one, a guy flipped pancakes and invited the crew to “swing by my cabin.” In another, a woman in curlers refused to be seen “in this condition.” A cereal enthusiast raged about a missing prize. A hammock napper protested the racket. A girl clutched a shred of apple skin like it was a ticking bomb in her molar. A dozen noisy lives, each complaining, boasting, living. My plan was obvious: practice now so I could write for Mad Magazine later.

    Enter Mrs. Eckhart, patrolling the aisles like customs at the border. Red bouffant immaculate, eyebrows stepped out of a Hitchcock film. She stopped at my desk and stared down at the sub—my U.S.S. Bad Timing.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

    “I finished the assignment. I’m working quietly.”

    She read my dialogue bubbles aloud, pitch-perfect sarcasm, the kind that knives you with your own words. The class erupted. I was roast beef, she was the carving knife. Then the verdict: “Your parents should know this is how you spend classroom time.”

    She scrawled a note on the back of my masterpiece and demanded signatures before I returned it. At home, Dad examined the evidence like a prosecutor smelling a plea bargain.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

    “I don’t know why. I finished my work. I was quiet.”

    “It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

    “How?”

    “By finishing early and doodling, you told her the work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

    “I kept quiet. That’s hardly a crime.”

    “In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought they were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Today you were technically right and strategically stupid. Go to your room and think about it.”

    In exile, I summoned my emergency therapist: Master Po, Shaolin sage of my imagination.

    “Master Po, why am I the villain for drawing a submarine? And what does ‘be smart, not right’ even mean?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, voice like wind across stone, “the world is full of educated people who know nothing. Wisdom is entering another’s mind, seeing as they see. Your father is correct. Choose smart over right.”

    “If being right doesn’t count, why learn right from wrong at all?”

    “Model yourself on Heaven’s righteousness,” he said, “but travel the earth with tact. Know what you do not know.”

    “Know what I don’t know? That feels like a riddle you give to people you want to confuse.”

    “You strain at my words as muddy water through a sieve. Clarity will come.”

    “Meanwhile, I’m grounded and missing Hogan’s Heroes.”

    “Unfortunate,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry.

    “Life is a riddle I can’t solve.”

    “You try too hard. Relax. Let go. Answers fall like rain.”

    “I could relax more if Dad paroled me to the television.”

    “Sitting quietly is perfect. With no intention and no movement, you will, like the perfect traveler, arrive.”

    I stared at the ceiling, the paint a milky ocean, my submarine rolled into evidence on the desk. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe Mrs. Eckhart wasn’t grading my drawing so much as my social intelligence—and I’d failed the pop quiz. The adult world prized two currencies: accuracy and tact. I had exact change for the first and lint for the second.

    Still, some small part of me refused to shred the sub and plead guilty to artistic misconduct. Those porthole people—pancake guy, curler lady, apple-skin girl—were ridiculous, yes, but they were also alive, chattering in their cramped circles under a thousand fathoms of routine. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I drew a submarine; maybe the problem was I’d launched it in the wrong harbor.

    Fine. Next time I’d finish late, or pretend to. I’d ask one question with the tone of a pilgrim seeking wisdom. I’d keep the submarine for after school, where editors at Mad Magazine would understand that sometimes the only way to survive a classroom is to build your own vessel and sail beneath the noise.

    For now, I sat still, practicing the advanced art of “no intention, no movement.” If arrival meant living through this night without losing my sense of humor—or my drawing—I could live with that. Smart over right, sure. But right over silent? Not always. Sometimes you keep the submarine.

  • Master Po vs. My Perfect Alibi

    Master Po vs. My Perfect Alibi

    In 1972, on the dust-choked battlefield otherwise known as the Independent Elementary playground, Miguel Torres and I were locked in a holy war over an alleged clipping penalty. Gary Kauffman—self-appointed referee, rules committee, and prophet of doom—had flagged me during tag football, a call that would hand my team the loss. Words got hot. “Cheater” ricocheted between us like a stray bullet. Then Miguel’s fists did the talking—left, right, a percussion solo on my jaw.

    I cried—not because I stood there like a department-store mannequin while his knuckles composed a sonata on my face, but because I was blind. I hadn’t read the storm system building in my friend—barometric pressure falling, hostility rising—and I was stunned that my protest could yank that much fury out of someone who’d traded Twinkies with me at lunch.

    The recess bell shrieked. We jogged back to class, me sniffling, my face a throbbing geography lesson. Mrs. Eckhart opened My Side of the Mountain, but I heard only the drumbeat in my skull and the soft crush of my pride underfoot. I retreated inward to the place my imagination had been furnishing for months: a quiet stone courtyard outside the Shaolin Temple, the same one that glowed from our black-and-white TV. The river whispered nearby. Incense drifted like daydreams. And there stood my spiritual guide, Master Po—blind as justice, sharp as a scalpel.

    “Master Po,” I said, still tasting the copper of humiliation, “you once taught me that weakness prevails over strength and gentleness conquers. Yet my team lost, my friend rearranged my face, and I stood there helpless. Where was gentleness then?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “you mistake stubbornness for virtue. You are the rigid branch that neither sees the distant hills nor hears the cooling wind—and so you snap. Begin by seeing. Begin by listening.”

    “What am I not seeing? What am I not hearing?”

    He tilted his head. “For one, you did not hear the expletives cannoning from your mouth—shrapnel of spit landing on your friend’s cheeks. For two, you did not see your own finger spearing his chest, drilling his solar plexus as if mining for a confession.”

    “So I was ticking off Miguel without even knowing it?”

    “Precisely, Grasshopper. You cherry-pick facts to star in your favorite film—You, the Noble Victim—while everyone else auditions for Villain. Myth-making is a miraculous tool for preserving self-esteem. It is also the shortest road away from The Way.”

    “I don’t myth-make.”

    He raised an eyebrow in the patient way only the blind can. “When you were six, you slept at your aunt and uncle’s and wet the bed. Instead of accepting the weather report from your own bladder, you blamed…the Pee Fairy.”

    I winced. “I remember. It was quick thinking.”

    “What else do you remember?”

    “That I repeated the lie until it became embroidered truth. I argued anyone who doubted me into silence. The Pee Fairy did it. Obviously.”

    “Exactly,” he said. “When you muddle truth long enough, you lose your own outline. You become your costume.”

    “How do I follow The Way?”

    “Do not costume yourself. Do not curate a personality for the world like outfits for the first day of school. Let time carve you. Emerge by erosion, not construction.”

    “I’m eleven,” I said. “Time carves slowly. Also, if I don’t finish my social-studies questions by sixth period, I’ll be carving them in detention.”

    He smiled. “By doing nothing, everything is done.”

    “Try that on Mrs. Eckhart.”

    “You have much to learn, Grasshopper.”

    Back in the fluorescent glare of fifth grade, Mrs. Eckhart’s voice returned, turning pages into wind through trees. I pressed a cool palm to my cheekbone, felt the ache, and wondered if wisdom always arrived late—long after the bell, after the punch, after you realize you were yelling at a friend and mistook your echo for righteousness. Maybe gentleness isn’t an instant shield; maybe it’s a habit you grow, a small current under the noise, the kind that keeps a rigid branch from snapping when the playground becomes a courtroom and you’ve already sentenced yourself to innocence.

  • My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    My Doppelganger in Dark Sweats

    Last night I dreamed that a baby had been abandoned in the flower garden outside my San Francisco apartment. His thin wail rose above the city hum, but no one seemed to hear it but me. The world went on—cars passing, neighbors coming and going—while I alone stood transfixed by that cry. I lifted the baby from the dirt, his skin warm and impossibly soft, and held him against my chest. Standing at the threshold of the apartment I rented with my wife and our stray orange cat, I prayed for holiness and wept, as though the infant had been dropped from heaven for me alone to fail or redeem.

    Inside, the apartment felt like an expensive tomb—luxurious, dim, deliberately shadowed, as if light itself were rationed. I fed the child and watched him feed, marveled at the smallness of his breaths. When his parents arrived, both scientists, I confronted them. They were calm, rational, and convinced me of their legitimacy with clinical precision. Their excuse was airtight, their affect detached, and in the end, I surrendered the baby, though my faith in their explanation felt paper-thin.

    Then the parents and the baby were gone. At this point, my role inside the apartment was clear: My wife and I were educators using the apartment to host seminars on DNA and algorithms for college students. The air smelled faintly of coffee and ozone. During one of these sessions, the true apartment owner appeared: my thirty-year-old doppelgänger, tall, lean, dressed in the sleek anonymity of wealth—dark designer sweats, minimalist sneakers. He admired the apartment I had borrowed as though validating his own taste: the kitchen gadgets gleamed like relics, the food neatly arranged, the DVDs alphabetized. His presence was eerie—a reflection of my own mind rendered in a sharper resolution. We talked about the future buyer of the apartment, another iteration of us—older, familiar, running on the same mysterious algorithm encoded in our shared DNA.

    When the lecture ended, my wife and I returned the keys to my younger self and walked hand in hand along the apartment’s tennis courts. The sky had the bruised hue of evening. I told her that everything—the baby, the double, the science lectures—had overwhelmed me. I broke down, crying again for the purity I had felt when I prayed over the abandoned child. That moment at the doorstep remained the still point of the dream: holiness in the act of holding something utterly helpless, something untouched by algorithm or ownership.

  • Discontinued at the Light

    Discontinued at the Light

    At a red light yesterday, ferrying my daughters home from school, my car-spotter’s radar pinged. I scan traffic the way birders scan treelines, always hoping for the rare specimen with that elusive look. Something unusual flashed past—and in a beat I clocked it: a 2023 Nissan Maxima, the model’s final year. A voice in my head muttered, “Discontinued.” The word tolled like a small funeral bell, as if it weren’t about the Nissan at all but about me. You’re nearly sixty-four. You are discontinued.

    I refuse to go out like that. Aging is one thing; embalming yourself in morbid commentary is another. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years muttering “discontinued” at traffic, toast, or mirrors. That’s not wisdom. That’s a tantrum with better vocabulary.

    Let’s call morbidity what it is: the childish whining of a narcissist. Who escapes aging? Only the people who don’t get the privilege. Getting old means you’ve been alive for a long time and you’re still here. The refrain—“Discontinued,” “You’re washed up,” “It’s all over”—isn’t just bleak; it’s lugubrious, a mental ailment missing from the DSM-5-TR. Fine, I’ll name it myself: narcissistic morbidity. You moan about your age until you bore everyone around you, including the poor soul trapped inside your skull. You act like you invented birthdays.

    What makes my case extra ridiculous is that I’m in decent shape. I work out. I eat a high-protein diet. Yes, I’m fifteen pounds over fighting weight, but I don’t look like a cautionary tale. I should be grateful, robust, hearty, glad. And yet the diseased little sportscaster in my cranium keeps calling the game: I’ll be driving my daughters, spot a car out of production, and use it as my cue to point at myself—“Discontinued.”

    If I were a comedian, this would be a layup: a man in his sixties drowning in self-pity, heckled by his own internal voice. There’s material for days. But punchlines only work if you know your heckler’s origin story.

    Here’s the reveal: the voice isn’t new. I’ve had it since childhood, a fog machine that kept me holed up drawing and reading while calamity forecasts scrolled across my mind. “The circus will be closed. A lion will escape. There’ll be a riot. Let’s not go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll entertain myself.” “The ice-cream place won’t have my flavor. Let’s stay home; I’ll eat cereal.” “If I throw a party, no one will come. Cancel my birthday this year—and the years after. Who needs a birthday anyway?”

    My gloomy companion even had a cartoon avatar: Glum, the tiny pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, late ’60s. Dressed in green, eternally peckish, and permanently resigned—“It’s hopeless.” “We’ll never make it.” “It’ll never work.” “We’re doomed.” He was my first soulmate: snack-oriented, catastrophe-forward.

    Back then TV specialized in a certain archetype—the Dead Weight Character—the one who drags the mission, sandbags morale, and sabotages the plan by simply existing. Land of the Giants fielded Commander Alexander Fitzhugh, a selfish criminal who once gnawed a giant scientist’s rabbit pellets and urged his tiny crew to feast with him because of “nutrition,” a word he repeated over and over as he consumed rabbit pellets. They saw humiliation; he saw survival. Dead Weight comes in many flavors.

    And then there was the greatest Dead Weight of them all: Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space, immortalized by Jonathan Harris, patron saint of theatrical dread. His alliterative insults aimed at the Robot taught me that language could purr, hiss, and bite. Dr. Smith is, frankly, the reason I went to college and became an English major. If you’re going to sabotage a mission, at least do it with diction.

    So if I must live with an inner prophet of doom, I might as well upgrade his elocution. If the voice insists on heckling—calling me discontinued at stoplights and breakfast tables—then give it rhetorical muscle and meter. Let it speak in crafted sentences, not groans. Aging will still arrive right on schedule, but at least the narration won’t be dead weight.

  • Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Latte Palace at the End of the Earth

    Last night I dreamed that my mother and her family—gone twenty years and counting—came back to life as if they’d only stepped outside for air. No trumpet blast, no spectral fog. Just my aunt’s kitchen in Los Angeles: sunlight on the vinyl, the smell of coffee and waffles, forks tapping plates like tiny hammers. My mother kissed my cheek the way she used to, a quick press and a pat—quality control for the living.

    Between bites of waffles and scrambled eggs my grandfather announced, in the same voice he used for weekend errands, that we were driving to a mansion in Alaska. He said “mansion” as if it were around the corner, not at the end of the continent and a climate shift away. Heads nodded. Coats appeared. Dream logistics are ruthless: one cut and we were already rolling, my grandfather at the wheel of a weary sedan, a caravan of relatives stacking up behind us like punctuation.

    The city dissolved. Los Angeles flattened into a silver slab, then a bright white riddle. Snow stitched itself across the windshield; the tires made that soft, murderous hush you hear on ice. My grandfather drove with cheerful indifference to physics, tapping the wheel to music only he could hear. I watched the road bloom and vanish and thought: so this is how resurrection handles transportation—no chariot of fire, just black ice and a bench seat.

    We crested a hill and there it was: a palace poured in espresso and cream, a latte-colored sprawl with too many windows and the kind of confidence money wears when it doesn’t expect to be told no. Someone in the back called it “Politburo chic,” and the phrase snapped into place—midcentury power with an indoor fur policy. The façade implied heated floors and quiet compromises. The roofline looked like it had read every memo and approved half of them.

    What struck me wasn’t that my family had returned; it was how casual I felt about it. My mother was alive. My grandfather was alive. Aunts and uncles murmured behind me, inventorying snacks, debating rooms. And I sat there with the calm of a man who receives an impossible package on his porch and signs without reading the label. Maybe grief is software and last night the update finally took.

    We idled at the circular drive while the house regarded us with its many eyes. I tried to imagine the foyer: the smell of wax and cold marble, a staircase that curves with the arrogance of a purebred. My brain kept blurring the picture like a censor’s bar. I could sense chandeliers, a staff of refined butlers. 

    But I woke up before entering the mansion. Now more than anything, I feel tantalized by what was inside that mansion. Now I’ll never know. 

  • State of the Misalignment Situation

    State of the Misalignment Situation

    I had hoped my blog, Cinemorphosis, would feed my video essays—serve as a compost heap of half-baked thoughts that could later bloom into something cinematic and worthy of making video essays. Instead, the blog has swallowed the energy that once went into my videos. What was meant to be a support system has become a rival ecosystem. The crossover I imagined—the blog fueling the videos and the videos enriching the blog—never happened. It turns out writing and filming come from different parts of the brain, and those parts refuse to share the same neural conference room.

    Friends say, “Don’t sweat it, McMahon. Just lean into the blog and let the videos go.” Easy advice for people who aren’t haunted by the specter of irrelevance. I can’t shake the feeling that the video essays keep me sharper—more visible, more alive. The blog satisfies my mind; the camera keeps me from turning into dust.

    Sam Harris once said he can spend five years writing a book, agonizing over edits and the publishing gauntlet, only to reach a few thousand readers—if he’s lucky. Meanwhile, a one-hour podcast can reach millions overnight, and snippets of it go viral before the author’s espresso cools. That line haunts me. The medium matters. The way we reach people has become part of the message.

    I see the same logic in my own small way. A blog post I’m proud of might earn a few dozen engagements. A decent video essay? Thousands of views, maybe more. But numbers only tell part of the story. The real draw is the vitality the videos demand—something performative, almost athletic. When I’m on camera, I feel like I’m “getting my reps in,” keeping mentally limber. The blog is therapy; the videos are training.

    Still, there’s a fine line between vitality and vanity. Part of me believes the videos keep me youthful, engaged, even relevant. Another part suspects it’s all just a resistance workout against mortality. Staying fit is one thing; refusing to age gracefully is another. Desperation doesn’t wear well on men over sixty, even under good lighting.

    So maybe writing suits me better now. Maybe the written word is the right pace for a man learning to accept that his eyesight, patience, and tech literacy are all in slow retreat. Maybe I should only return to video when I have something worth saying—something that isn’t just a performance of endurance.

    Which brings me to the real question: what do I still have to contribute?

    For over a decade, my YouTube channel orbited around my watch obsession. That obsession gradually narrowed until it became monastic—just diver watches, all on straps. I convinced myself that a collection larger than seven would doom me to spiritual ruin. I also stopped flipping watches like a Wall Street day trader, deciding it was bad for my mental health. That slowdown siphoned the manic energy that used to fuel my videos. The creative rush didn’t vanish—it simply rerouted into blog posts about my newest fixation: alignment. Or more precisely, misalignment.

    Because if I’m honest, I feel increasingly out of sync with the modern world. I adapt to new technology at the pace of continental drift. TikTok bewilders me. Smartphones offend my thumbs. Driving at night now feels like a scene from Apocalypse Now. My relevance, visibility, and patience are fading in a culture that worships youth and touchscreens.

    My anxieties about self-worth and mortality are now on the front burner, while watch collecting—the “Watch Potency Principle,” the “wrist-rotation anxiety”—has been moved to the back burner where it is simmering to a lukewarm stew.

    To illustrate my current state: two weeks ago, I bought a new LG OLED TV, which was fine—until I broke two Samsungs in one day trying to move them. I manhandled the first 55-inch like it was a kettlebell, frying half its pixels in a single jerk. Then I jammed my thumb straight through the second screen while relocating it from my daughter’s room. My wife, the household adult, had to carry the new Roku replacement into our bedroom as I stood there looking like a Neanderthal who’d just discovered electricity—and promptly electrocuted himself.

    My war with technology didn’t end there. The new garage door opener came with instructions written in a dialect of cruel mockery. The installer vanished without explaining how to sync it with my phone, so my wife once again had to step in and figure it out. Now I open the garage door through an app, and every time I hear the alert that the door is moving, I step back in awe—half-terrified, half-mesmerized—like a caveman who’s just invented fire.

    I feel both too old for this world and too infantile to function in it. A man-baby marveling at his gadgets, bewildered by his own house. Think about that. My house has become a museum for technology of the future while I wander through it like a mesmerized tourist. My mouth is agape and my daughters say to me, “Relax, Dad, this is our house.” I respond by saying, “No it’s not. It’s a museum of strange and wonderful things that I don’t know how to use.” 

    These are the moments that give me content for my blog Cinemorphosis. I post almost daily, while it takes me weeks to metabolize these experiences into something coherent enough for a video essay. Writing helps me think; filming helps me pretend I’m still current.

    So that’s my current state of affairs. This channel used to be State of the Watch Collection. Now it’s more like State of the Man Who Can’t Sync His Garage Door Opener.

  • Caveman Meets Garage App

    Caveman Meets Garage App

    In March 2005, at 43, I was besotted with my Classic iPod and its holy clickwheel. It took a minute to learn how to tether it to desktop iTunes and wrangle my playlists (mostly podcasts), but I did it without pestering my wife, and I was proud. A newer iPod arrived soon after; I refused to learn its tricks. Once I master a gadget, it becomes my comfort zone—I’d rather live there than relocate.

    I listened to podcasts all night and during post-workout naps. My life felt archived in that iPod, which—ridiculously, wonderfully—made me feel plugged into the modern world.
    My wife, less sentimental, declared it obsolete. The future was smartphones. I recoiled. They looked like bricks of chaos—apps, updates, notifications—houseplants with demands, only worse because I had to squint at ant-sized text.

    By 2014, I still clung to the iPod. It wasn’t cheap loyalty: the headphone jack snapped about once a year, and I’d pay $70 at the local shop to resurrect it. Then September 2014 arrived, our twin daughters started preschool, and my wife insisted I get a smartphone—for school runs, doctor visits, playdates. Texting was essential; parenthood demanded it.

    So I pried my fingers off the fossil and bought a Galaxy S4 at Costco. To my surprise, downloading podcasts was blissfully easy. As a podcast machine, the phone was a star. Everything else? Lame. I hated watching tiny videos, reading tiny text, and spelunking for apps. The phone became a super-iPod; the rest of its features were just extra chaos. Texting was torture—my fat fingers whacked the wrong letters, and I backspaced my way through tedium. I barely used the thing except for podcasts. My wife envied my perpetually 90% battery; to console her, I’d brag that after an all-night podcast binge I dropped to a shocking 80%.

    Yes, smartphones are addiction machines that track, nudge, and strip privacy. True. But I only use a sliver of their powers because the tactile experience annoys me.

    Part of me resents the smartphone for killing the rotary landline. That dial’s ratcheting click felt like reciting a secret code to open a cave. Beige, avocado, mint green, custard—those phones had heft that implied quality, with long, flexible cords that snaked across the room. Conversations were events; an ear would grow tender and force the ritual mid-call ear swap. Now the landline is dead—and so, largely, are conversations, replaced by texts and emojis. Speed and convenience exacted their toll: degraded communication, which means degraded friendships.

    Cory Doctorow gave us enshittification—how tech optimizes itself into garbage. I’d love to say that’s why I resist. But that’s too pat. I’m simply slow to adapt. Incompetent with new tools. My memory refuses the steps; I have to re-teach myself, again and again.

    Recently, my wife synced my phone to our garage door. A week later, I tapped the app and watched the door rise, gawking like a caveman who just discovered fire and is already imagining a barbecued brontosaurus rack. It’s a good trick. I still keep Genie remotes in the house and car as backups, but the phone option is lovely. This isn’t enshittification; it’s the opposite—unsuckification. Some things that used to suck don’t have to anymore.

    In fact, I’m eager for toilet + AI matrimony: a throne that reads biomarkers, prescribes medication, screens like a colonoscopy, and spares me the waiting room. I’m also rooting for a custom GLP-1 patch that recalibrates appetite so a morning bowl of porridge with protein powder—and another in the late afternoon—actually sates me. Easy weight management, better markers, minimal dishes.

    All of this is part of the unsuckification project.

    I’ll admit it: I’m older, I resist change, and new tech gives me a headache. But if modern tech can spare me a colonoscopy, open heart surgery, and the indignities of being twenty pounds overweight, then sign me up. 

  • Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    The mother of misery is comparison. In fourth grade I plunged into despair because I couldn’t draw like Joseph Schidelman, the illustrator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. About the same time, baseball humbled me: my bat speed wasn’t in the same galaxy as Willie Mays, Dick Allen, or Henry Aaron. In my teenage bodybuilding years, I had muscles, but nothing like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva, and Frank Zane; I wisely retired the fantasy of becoming Mr. Universe and managing a gym in the Bahamas. In college, as an aspiring intellectual, I flogged myself for lacking Vladimir Nabokov’s wit and velocity. My chances of becoming a famous novelist were equal to my odds of winning Mr. Olympia. Later, when I flirted with composing and singing, I heard Jeff Buckley’s soul pour through the speakers and realized my voice would mainly trigger a neighborhood dog-barking contest and a chorus of angry neighbors. Decades passed. My classroom persona faced a generation handcuffed to smartphones and ChatGPT. I scrambled for “edutainment” tricks to dodge irrelevance, but the gap widened no matter how I danced.

    The sting doubled when I watched Earthquake (Nathaniel Stroman) flatten an audience with a preacher’s cadence and bulletproof wisdom. His special Joke Telling Business left me muttering, “If I had Earthquake’s power, I could resuscitate my teaching career and stroll into old age with a shred of dignity.”

    Meanwhile, fresh incompetencies arrived like junk mail. I broke two Samsung TVs in one day. I failed to sync my new garage door opener to my phone. My wife had to rescue me from my own maladroit tech spiral. The result was predictable: I was condemned to the Shame Dungeon.

    Down in the basement of depression, I noticed another casualty: my YouTube channel. I usually post once a week and have for over a decade—mostly about my obsession with diver watches. But as sanity demanded I stop flipping watches, I ran out of new divers to discuss. I tried pivoting—open with a little watch talk, then segue to a wry misadventure with a morsel of human insight. If I nailed the landing, I’d get a few thousand views and enough comment energy to believe the enterprise mattered.

    But with my sixty-fourth birthday closing in, the doubts got loud. I don’t want to do “watch talk,” and I’m too mortified to perform a perky, self-deprecating monologue about my misalignment with the universe.

    I keep hearing Mike Birbiglia in my head: you must process your material before you present it; the set has to be a gift, not your live catharsis. The healing happens before you step onstage. You speak from the far shore, not mid-drowning. Otherwise, you’re asking the audience to be your therapist.

    So I’m stuck at a fork: Will this current fear and anxiety about age and disconnection pass through the refinery of my psyche and emerge as something worthy? Or will I remain in the Shame Dungeon, comparing myself to Earthquake, and decide that with talent like his prowling the earth, my best move is to hide under a rock?

    Here’s the dilemma plain: Hiding isn’t viable; it starves the soul. But serving the world a plate of unprocessed mediocrity is just as unforgivable. If I’m going to tell a story about breaking two TVs and my garage-opener meltdown, I have to deliver it with Earthquake’s power and confidence. Otherwise I’ll stay home, mope on the couch, and binge crime documentaries—losing myself in bigger, cleaner tragedies than my own.