Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • The Price of Your Work Exit

    The Price of Your Work Exit

    Retirement was supposed to feel like a gentle descent. Instead, it arrives with an invoice. For years, your college played the role of benevolent patron: five hundred dollars a month to insure a family of four at Kaiser Permanente, with a co-pay so small it felt almost ceremonial. Now the curtain lifts. Your wife’s middle school, thrifty to the point of cruelty, hands you the real number—nearly triple. At the same time, your paycheck shrinks to about eighty-five percent of its former self. The vise tightens from both ends: less coming in, far more going out. Retirement, it turns out, is not an exit but a recalibration of anxiety.

    On a Saturday morning, under the fluorescent calm of Trader Joe’s, you confess this arithmetic of dread to the cashier who has watched you age in weekly installments for two decades. He listens, nods, and then offers a solution with the confidence of a man suggesting a new brand of hummus: get a part-time job here. Be a cashier. Let the paycheck subsidize your health insurance. You have the build, the stamina, the conversational ease. In his telling, the transition is almost heroic—a late-life pivot, sleeves rolled, dignity intact.

    But you can already see the other version. You, sixty-five, standing in a Hawaiian shirt that once signaled leisure and now reads as camouflage, being told in a quarterly review that your tone lacks “warmth.” That you cleared the line too efficiently, failed to linger, failed to affirm. That your sarcasm—once a badge of intellect—needs to be diluted into something safer, sweeter, more compliant. You imagine the language of correction: more honey, less acid. You imagine nodding while someone half your age explains emotional calibration. The phrase writes itself in your head: a Late-Life Vocational Humility Crisis—the moment when accumulated status collides with the small, bright humiliations of starting over at the bottom, where friendliness is a metric and personality is a deliverable.

    You float the idea at home. Your wife laughs—not cruelly, but decisively. The verdict is clear: you are not built for this theater. The fantasy collapses on contact with reality. It was never a plan, only a flattering daydream in which you played the rugged provider, stacking pinto beans beside water-packed albacore, funding your family’s security with cheerful competence.

    So you stand in front of the mirror and deliver the final ruling: Trader Joe’s is a no-go. The new discipline will be quieter, less cinematic. No convertibles. No Swiss watch indulgences. No Cabo timeshare fantasies dressed up as investments. Just a narrower life, lived within its means, spared the indignity of proving—too late—that you can still take orders and smile about it.

  • The Man Who Refused to Retire and Learned to Fly at Costco

    The Man Who Refused to Retire and Learned to Fly at Costco

    You will be sixty-five in less than a year—fifteen months from your last day of work—and you would be wise to bury the word “retirement” before it buries you. It is a feeble, anemic term, a linguistic sedative that disguises the collapse of identity as leisure. Nothing about what lies ahead deserves that kind of small thinking.

    What you are approaching requires a name with altitude, velocity, and a touch of myth.

    You are entering the Sovereign Phase.

    In the Sovereign Phase, you do not keep a schedule—you issue one. You do not await approval—you render decisions. This is not an ending ceremonially dressed in khakis and early dinners; it is a coronation. You are not stepping away. You are stepping above.

    Your final act has begun, and it demands a certain boldness. The first order of business is symbolic but essential: you will upgrade your Costco membership to Executive. No committees. No approvals. No memos. You will simply decide—and it will be done.

    And then, one morning, before the doors officially open to the masses, you will enter.

    The aisles are empty. The pallets stand fresh and untouched. The air itself feels newly issued. You move through this cathedral of abundance with first access, first choice, first claim. Something happens to you here—something disproportionate to the act itself. A quiet but unmistakable inflation of the self. A sense that you have not merely arrived early, but ascended.

    You feel it in your chest first, then in your stride. The strange conviction that you are no longer bound by ordinary constraints. That you have, somehow, earned this.

    You have entered Executive Aisle Rapture.

    It is a near-mystical condition in which logistical privilege is mistaken for existential elevation, where empty aisles and shrink-wrapped towers of goods produce a sensation that borders on the divine. You begin to suspect that wings—actual wings—may be forming beneath your shirt, preparing you for a short, ill-advised flight toward the sun.

    This is not a side effect of the Sovereign Phase. It is a requirement.

    So when your last day of work arrives, do not mark it with melancholy or relief. Mark it with a transaction. Upgrade the membership. Secure your access. Step into the early light of the warehouse.

    And when the doors part and the aisles open before you, walk forward without hesitation.

    You are no longer a worker.

    You are sovereign.

  • The Psychological Mess of Wanting Things We Neither Need Nor Intend to Use

    The Psychological Mess of Wanting Things We Neither Need Nor Intend to Use

    One of the strangest features of materialism is the spectacular mismatch between what we imagine an object will do for us and what it actually does. In the mind, the object arrives polished, transcendent—an emblem of taste, discipline, even identity. In reality, it often sits there, unnecessary and faintly ridiculous, like a prop waiting for a performance that never begins. 

    I own an eight-year-old Accord with fewer than 30,000 miles on it—a statistic that quietly announces I neither drive much nor particularly enjoy driving. And yet I can picture, with embarrassing clarity, a brand-new Accord or Camry resting in my garage, gleaming like a sacred artifact I would prefer not to disturb by actually using it.

    Watches operate under the same spell. I can easily imagine owning a Tudor Black Bay or a Tudor Pelagos, each one promising a kind of quiet authority on the wrist. But my habits betray me. I’m not roaming public spaces, not projecting presence, not leveraging this object as a social signal. The watch would sit, admired in theory, unused in practice. I know dozens—no, hundreds—of watch enthusiasts who live in this same contradiction, accumulating pieces they rarely wear because the idea of ownership is more intoxicating than the act of use.

    This gap between having and being is hardly new. I was reminded of it while thinking about Erich Fromm and his book To Have or To Be?, which argues that materialism quietly erodes the possibility of a meaningful life grounded in connection and experience. The argument is persuasive—almost obvious once stated. And yet, knowing this changes very little.

    That’s the part that unsettles me. You can understand the critique, agree with it, even teach it, and still find yourself browsing for the next unnecessary object with the focus of a predator. Clarity does not neutralize desire. It merely observes it, like a detached narrator watching the same old plot unfold. There’s something almost comical about it—this split between the thinking self and the acquisitive impulse. If you wanted to document the absurdity of human behavior, you could dedicate an entire season of Dirty Jobs to it: not the grime of physical labor, but the psychological mess of wanting things we neither need nor intend to use.

  • From Lecture Hall to Checkout Line: A Better Second Act

    From Lecture Hall to Checkout Line: A Better Second Act

    Over the past several years, I’ve watched a pattern unfold. A colleague retires, disappears for a while, and then—two years later—reappears in the writing center as a volunteer. On paper, it looks noble. In person, it looks something else.

    They don’t return with ease or quiet confidence. They return looking unsettled—eyes fixed forward, posture stiff, like deer caught in headlights that never turn off. I’ve seen them alone on the writing lounge couch, staring straight ahead, as if waiting for something that never quite arrives. The impression is hard to shake: retirement didn’t liberate them; it hollowed something out. And so they came back to the place where their sense of worth once had structure and witnesses.

    Students, however, are not sentimental. They don’t greet these returnees as beloved elders. They approach them the way one approaches a last option—politely, cautiously, and only when necessary. The exchange feels inverted. Instead of giving value, the retiree seems to be extracting it: a little affirmation, a little proof of continued relevance, a small ration of being needed.

    The idea of volunteering after retirement sounds admirable in theory. In practice, it reminds me of Lot’s wife—turning back, unable to release the past, even when the mandate is to move forward.

    And I say all this with some unease, because I’m about fifteen months away from retirement myself. My job has kept my mind engaged for decades—lectures, lesson plans, essays, the constant friction of thinking. I can’t pretend I’m immune to the same forces that seem to have pulled my colleagues back: the slow creep of isolation, the loss of structure, the quiet erosion of purpose. Sloth and complacency don’t arrive dramatically; they seep in.

    Still, I’m fairly certain of one thing: I won’t be returning as a volunteer tutor. I see too much of Lot’s wife in that gesture and not enough of a forward-facing project that justifies it.

    There’s also the matter of audience. Students gravitate toward youth. My own teen daughters regard “Boomers” like me with a mix of mild embarrassment and occasional alarm, as if we are well-meaning but out of date. I’m not eager to test that perception in a room where attention is already scarce.

    If pride is a vice, it’s at least an honest one here. My read on younger students, combined with my own instincts, tells me that the writing center would not be my best second act.

    There may be other roles. I’ve entertained, half-seriously, the idea of working part-time at my local Trader Joe’s. I know the staff. I could use the income for health insurance. And I have a skill set that would actually translate: I can talk to people, keep a line moving, and bag groceries without turning it into a philosophical crisis. There’s dignity in that—perhaps more than in hovering around a former life, waiting to be needed.

    One thing I do know: wherever I land, I don’t intend to sit there staring into the middle distance, hoping someone will give me back a version of myself I’ve already lived.

  • You Can’t Hack Friendship

    You Can’t Hack Friendship

    A shortage of friendship seeps into everything. It distorts your thinking, magnifies your obsessions, and turns both your work and your home life into echo chambers. What begins as a quiet absence becomes a governing condition. The burden doesn’t stay neatly contained within you; it spills outward, pressing on your family, altering the atmosphere of every room you occupy.

    Active friendship is not a luxury. It is a nutrient. Deprive the soul of it and you don’t merely feel a little off—you begin to atrophy. The comparison is almost clinical: friendship is to the psyche what protein is to muscle. Neglect it long enough and weakness follows, then dysfunction, then a kind of emotional brittleness that snaps under ordinary strain.

    Your predicament has a familiar shape. You reach out. The response is lukewarm, delayed, or politely distant. You respect boundaries—yours and theirs—so you retreat. The retreats accumulate. What began as courtesy hardens into habit. Eventually, not seeing friends stops feeling like a temporary lull and starts to resemble a lifestyle. The absence becomes routine, then normal, then invisible.

    The culture is more than happy to bless this arrangement. Adults, we’re told, naturally drift into smaller circles. Life is busy. Everyone is tired. The internet offers a thin, flickering substitute for presence. Add in economic pressure—the side hustles, the quiet anxiety about money—and friendship begins to look like a discretionary expense. Time becomes a zero-sum game, and friendship is the line item that keeps getting cut.

    Age compounds the problem. The older you get, the more fixed your habits become. The friction of meeting new people increases. The old friendships fade—some through neglect, some through conscious uncoupling, most through the slow erosion of time. Replacements don’t arrive. They rarely do.

    Then there’s pride, that silent enforcer. You don’t talk about the absence. You don’t announce your loneliness. The first rule is to pretend there is no problem. You keep your complaints internal, your need concealed. You perform composure. You suffer privately, as if dignity requires it.

    You may even suspect this was always your trajectory. You look back at your parents and see hints of the same pattern—difficult temperaments, limited circles, a tendency toward inwardness. You begin to wonder if you’re not simply repeating a script written long before you understood it.

    Over time, solitude becomes architecture. You build a small, fortified life and call it independence. It starts to resemble something like C. S. Lewis’s description of hell: a self-constructed enclosure where nothing enters and nothing leaves. You seal the doors, throw the key beyond the walls, and then convince yourself this arrangement is freedom. It is, in fact, a perfectly engineered loneliness.

    Inside the fortress, you have time—too much of it. Memory begins to intrude. You recall childhood, when friendship required no strategy and no scheduling. It was as natural as breathing. You laughed without agenda. You learned who you were in the presence of others. Those early alliances—messy, loud, unfiltered—helped shape your sense of right and wrong, belonging and identity.

    Adulthood replaces that immediacy with calculation. Time fragments. Obligations multiply. Your circle shrinks. The hunger for connection doesn’t disappear; it mutates. You turn to social media, posting curated glimpses of a life that appears connected. The response—likes, comments, brief exchanges—offers a diluted version of what you’re actually missing. It looks like friendship at a distance, but it lacks weight. Eventually, even that thin substitute fails to satisfy, and you drift away from it too.

    You try another route: creation. You write. You play music. You hope that expression will generate connection. People may admire what you produce. They may even love it. But admiration is not friendship. Applause is not companionship. A well-received paragraph cannot sit across from you at a table.

    There is no workaround. No clever substitution. No technological proxy or “life hack” that fills the gap.

    At some point, you have to say it plainly: the absence of friendship is a problem.

    What follows that admission is uncertain. There is no neat solution waiting on the other side of the sentence. But there is at least this: you are no longer pretending. You are no longer calling deprivation a preference or isolation a virtue.

    You are, finally, telling the truth.

  • Two Hours in a Hotel Room: My Mechanical Watch Purgatory

    Two Hours in a Hotel Room: My Mechanical Watch Purgatory

    At night, I go to bed wearing one of my Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks. When I wake up, it’s still there—quietly correct, indifferent to my dreams. I make coffee. I eat porridge fortified with protein powder, as if I’m feeding a machine that happens to have a pulse. I write. I take my daughters to school. I return home, sit at the piano, and tap out something halfway between discipline and distraction before changing into workout clothes.

    Then the ritual begins.

    Before I train, I remove the G-Shock and place it—carefully, almost ceremonially—into an open ceramic butter dish. Inside are two watch pillows, like small upholstered altars. I set the dish by the living room window, perched on actual pillows, and let the watches drink sunlight. I don’t charge them. I feed them. They sit there absorbing photons like obedient livestock while I sweat through my penance.

    After the workout, after the shower, after lunch, I leave the G-Shocks at the window, basking in their solar feast, and I reach for a mechanical Seiko diver. This is where things get strange.

    I wear the mechanical for my nap.

    Not because I prefer it. Not because I need it. But because I feel I owe it something.

    For two hours, I strap on a relic of my former life—polished steel, automatic movement, the old romance of gears and springs. I rotate through four of them, day after day, as if fulfilling a contractual obligation. They sit on my wrist like ghosts with good machining.

    And then I take them off.

    I return to my G-Shock the way a traveler returns home after a brief, awkward stay in a hotel. The mechanical watch is the Holiday Inn—clean, respectable, vaguely unsettling in its impermanence. I check out after two hours, hand in the key to a staff member in the hotel lobby, and fly back to where I actually live: atomic time, solar power, numbers that tell the truth without flourish.

    Something happened to me. I can feel it, but I can’t fully explain it yet.

    For twenty years, I was immersed in mechanical dive watches. Not casually—devotionally. They were objects of study, desire, identity. And now, when I look at them, I don’t feel longing. I feel… residue. A faint aftertaste of something that once promised more than it could deliver.

    Pain might be too strong a word. But it’s in the neighborhood.

    I find myself wondering if addiction—because let’s stop pretending it wasn’t that—is less about pleasure and more about escape. About trying to solve something internal with something external. A watch becomes a talisman, a small, gleaming object that whispers: This will fix it. This will complete you.

    It never does, of course. It just resets the hunger.

    Maybe that’s what I’m processing now. Not just the watches, but what they stood in for. The idea that acquiring the right object could quiet something restless inside me. The belief that completion was one purchase away.

    Now I’m in a strange in-between state. Not fully attached to the old world, not entirely settled into the new one. The two-hour mechanical watch session feels like a concession—an obligation to a former self I haven’t fully buried. It’s polite. It’s controlled. It’s also faintly absurd.

    The G-Shocks, by contrast, feel like clarity. They don’t seduce. They don’t promise transcendence. They just tell the time—accurately, relentlessly, without commentary. And for now, that’s enough.

    But I don’t fully understand what’s happened to me yet.

    Give me a year.

    I suspect I’ll have a better answer—or at least a more honest question.

  • Stop Chasing the Perfect Watch–It Doesn’t Exist

    Stop Chasing the Perfect Watch–It Doesn’t Exist

    I love the digital displays on my Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000 and Casio G-Shock GW-7900. They tell me the time with blunt authority. No interpretation. No ceremony. Just numbers that land in the brain like a verdict.

    And yet, apparently, that isn’t enough.

    Somewhere along the way I developed a new appetite—no, let’s call it what it is, greed. I don’t just want clear numerals anymore. I want absurdly large numerals. I want wrist-mounted billboards. I want a wall clock strapped to my arm so I can read the time from across the room like a man who refuses to participate in subtlety.

    Naturally, the good people of G-Shock Nation pointed me toward the Casio G-Shock GW-9500 Mudman. The Mudman, they said, has the numbers. Big, bold, unapologetic digits that look like they were designed for someone who has lost patience with squinting.

    And they’re right—mostly.

    Mudman owners speak about their watch with a curious mix of affection and confession. They praise the size of the numerals, the rugged build, the sheer presence of the thing. Then, almost sheepishly, they admit that the display can blur at certain angles, that the duplex layering introduces a faint haze, that it’s not quite as clean as they’d like. They dock it a star. Four out of five.

    Then they shrug and say they love it anyway.

    That’s the part that matters.

    Because it raises a question most of us spend years avoiding: is there such a thing as a five-star watch?

    I’ve finally accepted the answer. There isn’t. There are only trade-offs you can tolerate without resentment.

    I’ve been chasing a very specific fantasy: huge numerals, high contrast, perfect viewing angles, and zero cognitive load. A watch that doesn’t need to be read so much as absorbed. A watch that behaves like a wall clock—instant, effortless, undeniable. What I’ve discovered is that watches can deliver three of those qualities with confidence. They just can’t deliver all four at once.

    My GW-7900 comes closest to frictionless clarity. Its display is stable, legible, and immediate. But the digits, while excellent, don’t quite scratch that billboard itch. The Mudman 9500 pushes in the opposite direction. It gives me the numbers—big, thick, impossible to ignore—but introduces a new problem: at certain angles, the display hesitates. Instead of receiving the time, I have to negotiate with it.

    Then there are the Pro Trek models, with their crisp, high-contrast STN displays. Technically superior. Visually disciplined. And yet, in their refinement, they lose that blunt, wall-clock immediacy. They are precise, but not emphatic.

    What fascinates me is how quickly Mudman owners make peace with imperfection. They acknowledge the flaws, subtract a star, and keep wearing the watch. That’s not compromise in the defeated sense. It’s acceptance. They’ve decided which imperfection they can live with, and they’ve moved on.

    That realization forced me to confront what I’m actually chasing. It isn’t a watch. It’s a state of mind—frictionless time perception. I want to glance at my wrist and have the time imposed on me without effort, hesitation, or ambiguity. But a wristwatch isn’t built for that ideal. It’s constrained by size, power, durability, and the stubborn limits of display technology. Something always gives.

    There is, to be fair, a strong case for the Mudman. Bigger numerals do make the time easier to read most of the time. Its toughness invites confidence. Its design has a certain muscular charisma. For many people, that combination outweighs the occasional moment of haze or glare.

    But I’ve had to admit something about myself: I value consistency over peak performance. A watch that is occasionally perfect but intermittently irritating will wear me down. I don’t want to negotiate with my watch. I want to glance and know.

    So the conclusion is both obvious and oddly liberating. There is no perfect watch. Once you accept that, the chase loses its urgency. You stop looking for the mythical five-star object and start making deliberate choices.

    The real question isn’t, “Which watch gets me closest to perfection?”

    It’s this: Which imperfection can I live with—and still enjoy checking the time a hundred times a day?

  • Take a Year Off Buying Watches—And See What’s Left

    Take a Year Off Buying Watches—And See What’s Left

    Daniel Samayoa and I met at several watch meet-ups in Long Beach, just outside Mimo’s Jewelry. We quickly discovered a shared fascination not only with watches themselves, but with the strange ways timepieces take hold of the mind. With that in mind, Daniel offers a guest post for my blog Cinemorphosis, examining the psychology of watch addiction and the habits that keep collectors in its grip:

    At a certain point, the habit stops being a hobby and starts looking like compulsion dressed up as enthusiasm.

    We all like new watches. We also all like taking a good shit. That doesn’t mean you should do it ten times a day and call it a hobby.

    The same principle applies to watch collecting. Just because you feel the urge doesn’t mean you need to act on it. That “great value” diver you just discovered—the one you’re convinced is different this time—will likely be worn twice before it disappears into the padded anonymity of your watch box.

    And that’s the problem.

    You tell yourself you’re building a collection, but what you’re really doing is chasing a small hit of excitement with every purchase. The watch isn’t the point. The transaction is. The anticipation is. The brief illusion of completion is.

    Then it fades, and you’re back where you started.

    It shows.

    Some of you don’t have collections. You have accumulation—watch boxes that resemble clearance racks, full of pieces that once felt essential and now feel optional at best.

    Here’s a simple experiment: stop buying watches for a year. Not a month. Not a “cooling-off period.” A full year.

    A one-year hiatus isn’t punishment; it’s diagnostic. When you remove the option to buy, you strip away the easiest form of self-distraction and force the habit into the open. The itch doesn’t disappear—it sharpens. You start to notice when it shows up: late at night, after a long day, in those idle gaps where boredom masquerades as curiosity. Without the relief of a purchase, you’re left to examine the mechanism itself—the rationalizations, the urgency, the quiet belief that the next watch will complete something that has never quite been defined. Over time, the noise subsides. What remains is clarity: which watches you actually reach for, what you value in them, and how much of your “collection” was built on impulse rather than need. The hiatus doesn’t take anything away. It reveals what was never there to begin with.

    More importantly, you’ll be forced to confront what you actually enjoy wearing. Not what impressed you in a YouTube review. Not what felt like a smart deal. The watches that earn wrist time—the ones that fit your life without effort.

    If you own nineteen watches and rotate through four, then you already have your answer. The rest are noise.

    The next time the urge hits, pause. Ask a direct question: does this watch have a clear role in my collection, or am I just bored and looking for stimulation?

    That question alone will eliminate most purchases.

    Then take it one step further: sell what you don’t wear. Not someday. Not when the market is better. Now.

    What remains won’t just be smaller—it will be coherent. Intentional. Yours.

    Because most people don’t need another watch.

    They need restraint.

    And a watch box that reflects decisions, not impulses.

  • I Can’t Count on Casio to Keep Making the Kind of Watch That I Want

    I Can’t Count on Casio to Keep Making the Kind of Watch That I Want

    My G-Shock GW-7900 is the best watch I’ve ever owned. Objectively speaking, it works better than my Frogman because its slightly smaller size makes it a better daily driver and its bigger, bolder digits are easy to read. I have thought of getting another 7900 (soon to be discontinued?) as a backup. I could wait and see if G-Shock makes another Tough Solar Multiband-6 with legible digital readout, but my wait might be in vain because I’ve come to accept something I didn’t want to admit at first: I can’t count on Casio to keep making the kind of watch I want. The combination I’ve zeroed in on—Tough Solar, Multiband 6, large, high-contrast digits, and a strap that comfortably fits my eight-inch wrist—isn’t just uncommon; it’s quietly disappearing. Watches like the GW-7900 didn’t fail. If anything, they solved the problem too well. They delivered time with such blunt clarity that there was nowhere obvious to go next—at least not if readability was the priority. But Casio doesn’t build its future around my priorities. It builds forward, and forward now means more sensors, more layers, more data, and more visual complexity.

    I can see the shift in the newer models. The GW-9500 Mudman looks like progress on paper: bigger digits, more information, more sophistication. But the duplex display muddies the water. The gray-on-gray layering introduces a subtle interference that makes the time less immediately legible, even as the numbers themselves get larger. The Pro Trek PRW-3500 goes the opposite route—clean, crisp, and highly readable—but with smaller digits and a more restrained, instrument-like feel. The Frogman GWF-D1000 adds size and presence, but also adds visual density. I can read it, but I have to look. I have to engage. The effortless glance is gone. In each case, something is gained. And in each case, something essential—immediacy—is diluted.

    This isn’t a fluke. It’s a direction. Casio is moving toward watches that look more technical, more advanced, more information-rich. The design language has shifted from blunt clarity to layered capability. In that world, a watch that simply tells me the time instantly starts to look almost primitive. But that so-called primitiveness is exactly what I value. The GW-7900 doesn’t ask me to process anything. It tells me the time with authority. I glance, and I know. No interpretation. No delay.

    I keep thinking maybe Casio will circle back. Maybe they’ll rediscover the appeal of simplicity and release something that restores that kind of clarity. It’s possible. But it’s not how they’ve operated. Casio doesn’t rewind; it iterates forward. And when a design philosophy gets left behind, it tends to stay there. The GW-9500 is probably as close as we’re going to get to a modern successor, and its compromises tell me everything I need to know.

    So I’m left with a realization that feels both obvious and unsettling: peak usability might already be behind me—not in some nostalgic sense, but in the simple fact that the problem I care about was already solved. The GW-7900 isn’t outdated. It’s optimized for a value the market is drifting away from. And that puts me in a different position than I expected. I’m not waiting for something better. I’m deciding whether I’m smart enough to recognize what I already have.

    Because the real risk isn’t missing out on the next great watch. The real risk is waiting. Waiting for a future model that aligns with my preferences while the present quietly disappears. I can easily imagine the moment: I decide I want another GW-7900, I go looking for one, and I realize the window has closed. The model is gone, or overpriced, or reduced to whatever scraps are left in the aftermarket.

    That’s the part that changes the equation for me. I’m not chasing something new. I’m securing something that already works.

  • Watch Straps, Paradise, and the Return of Mother

    Watch Straps, Paradise, and the Return of Mother

    Last night I found myself standing on a hill in Hawaii, the kind of place real estate agents describe as “transcendent” and charge accordingly. Below me, the ocean moved with rehearsed elegance—waves rolling in like they had been coached for the occasion. A tech billionaire, naturally, had invited my family and me to his New Year’s Eve party. In dreams, invitations arrive without explanation and are accepted without skepticism.

    Inside his mansion was a room devoted entirely to appetizers—a cathedral of small bites. I approached it with the zeal of a man who believes abundance is a moral right. Everything was sampled, nothing spared. Then I came upon a glass bowl filled with what appeared to be black licorice. I took a bite and immediately discovered I had made a categorical error. It wasn’t licorice. It was a bowl of rubber watch straps. I had, with full dental commitment, chewed into one of them like a lab animal testing the limits of its environment.

    The billionaire did not react. He stood in the next room, calmly painting a model holding yoga poses—his attention fixed, his world undisturbed. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he lived in a realm where a man biting into a watch strap barely registers as an event.

    Then my mother appeared.

    She has been gone for six years, but in the dream she returned without ceremony, as if death were a clerical error that had been quietly corrected. I greeted her with genuine joy and surprising composure, as though we had simply missed a few phone calls. She told me she was going for a swim. I said I’d join her later, the way one postpones something assumed to be indefinitely available.

    Time, as it does in dreams, rearranged itself. Someone came running to say she had cut her finger on coral. A doctor—there is always a doctor at these gatherings—offered to come with me, iodine and bandages in hand. But as we descended toward the water, word arrived that she had already been treated and had left for California.

    Meanwhile, I had waded into the ocean. The water was warm, enveloping, almost indulgent in its softness. It reached my chest and held me there, like something that preferred I not leave. Faced with the choice between urgency and comfort, I chose comfort. I stayed in the water. My mother, once again, slipped out of reach.

    What kind of dream arranges such a sequence? A billionaire’s excess, a son’s carelessness, a mother’s brief return and second departure. If I had to impose meaning, I’d say the ocean felt less like scenery and more like origin—a return to something pre-verbal, pre-ambition, pre-everything. Call it the womb, call it nature, call it a memory the body keeps when the mind forgets.

    But I hesitate to turn it into a sermon about mortality. Not every dream in one’s sixties needs to carry a funeral program in its back pocket. Perhaps it was about regeneration. Or the persistent illusion that what we lose might reappear long enough to test how we respond.

    I hope my dream was not some portent of mortality. But whatever the case, I’m glad the tech billionaire didn’t send security after me for leaving bite marks in one of his rubber watch straps.