Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    The Submarine That Got Me Punished

    One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading questions early and found myself with a full hour to kill. So I did what any quietly restless child with access to art paper would do: I drew a gigantic submarine.

    It was glorious. The hull bristled with portal windows, and inside each window lived a tiny, talkative world. Every occupant had something urgent to say. One man was making pancakes and inviting others over. A woman, her hair set in curlers, announced she was in no condition to be seen. Another guy sulked over a bowl of cereal because the box promised a free toy and delivered nothing. Someone tried to nap in a hammock but complained about the noise. A girl had a strip of apple skin lodged between her teeth and was losing her mind over it. There were at least a dozen such figures—boasting, whining, confessing, performing.

    It was a floating anthology of minor human grievances.

    I was proud of it. I felt like I was getting valuable training for my future career writing for Mad Magazine. I was quiet. I was finished with my work. I was bothering no one.

    Then Mrs. Eckhart appeared.

    She moved down the aisle between desks, paused, and studied my drawing. I waited for praise—some acknowledgment of creativity, wit, talent. Instead, I got disdain. Her red hair was stacked into a bouffant, her eyebrows arched in judgment.

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

    “But I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was working quietly.”

    She ignored that and began reading my dialogue bubbles aloud, dripping sarcasm into every line. The class erupted in laughter—not the good kind, the kind that comes from watching someone get filleted by authority.

    Then she delivered the verdict.

    “Your parents should know how you’re spending your time in my classroom.”

    She flipped the page over and wrote a note explaining my offense. I was to take it home, secure parental signatures, and return it like evidence.

    That evening, after dinner, I showed my father the drawing.

    He was livid.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

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

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

    “I don’t get it.”

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

    “But I didn’t say anything. I just drew.”

    “It doesn’t matter if you’re right,” he said. “What matters is you made her angry. In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought those were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Go to your room. Write her an apology.”

    I wrote the apology. But even then, I knew—deep down—I had done nothing wrong. In fact, to this day, that submarine remains the best use of time I ever managed in her class.

    The truth was simple: Mrs. Eckhart didn’t like me. I was brooding, inward, melancholic. She sensed something in me she found intolerable. Once, after she criticized a homework assignment, I tried to explain myself.

    “You have an excuse for everything, don’t you?” she snapped.

    If all my teachers had felt that way, I might accept the diagnosis. But they didn’t. Every other teacher thought I was polite, attentive, fine. There was something specific between us that never resolved.

    Sometimes hostility is not psychological; it’s biblical. It has no cause, no logic, no cure.

    I think of the excellent movie The Banshees of Inisherin. Colm abruptly ends his friendship with Padraic. No grievance. No inciting incident. “I just don’t like you anymore.” That’s it. Padraic hasn’t changed. Colm simply finds him unbearable.

    After nearly forty years of teaching, I know this pattern well. I’ve been popular, well-liked, even beloved by students—but that hasn’t spared me the occasional student who radiated pure contempt. Once, friendly students asked if I noticed a guy in the back who glowered at me all semester. I told them yes. Every so often, someone decides you are intolerable. There is no appeal process.

    In those cases, effort only makes things worse. Trying to win favor intensifies the repulsion. The Chinese phrase captures it perfectly: mei ban fa—nothing can be done.

    Do I resent Mrs. Eckhart? A little. She was an authority figure with a visceral dislike for a ten-year-old boy. But what endures most isn’t bitterness. It’s joy.

    That submarine was alive. It was funny. It was mine. No note home, no scolding, no pinch-faced teacher can take that away.

  • I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

    I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

    This morning, as I brushed my teeth and my daughters gathered their backpacks for the drive to school, I stared into the mirror and took inventory. There it was: a respectable gash carved into the crown of my nose. A souvenir. A reminder of last night’s three-hour descent into domestic warfare.

    The catalyst was banal. For reasons known only to entropy, the American Standard elongated toilet seat in my daughters’ bathroom had cracked. I bought a replacement immediately. Then I let it sit in my office for two weeks, radiating quiet menace. I told myself the job would be simple. My instincts told me it would be biblical.

    My instincts were correct.

    The hinge bolts on top were buried beneath a geological formation of rust. The plastic wing nuts underneath were no better—coated in a crusty patina that suggested they had been forged during the Eisenhower administration. First, I scraped and cleaned. Then I sprayed. Then I tried to loosen. Nothing moved. The bolts might as well have been welded to the bowl.

    So I escalated. Tools came out. Space disappeared. The cabinet loomed. There was no leverage, no angle, no dignity. I hammered. I wedged a flathead screwdriver against the bolt and struck it like I was trying to extract a confession. I attacked the wing nut with a wrench. Forty-five minutes passed. Sweat pooled. Hope thinned.

    I called my best friend’s son, a preternaturally calm handyman with three young children screaming in the background. We FaceTimed. He studied the situation and said, serenely, “You’re going to twist the bottom bolt back and forth like a paperclip. Eventually it’ll snap.”

    I thanked him and wedged myself beneath the toilet, contorting my body into a shape last attempted during Cold War espionage. I twisted. I rocked. At one point, my locking pliers slipped and I punched myself in the face, opening up my nose like a badly sealed envelope. Blood. Rage. Progress: none.

    An hour had passed. I had mutilated one plastic wing nut into modern art. While I was assessing my wound in the mirror, my wife calmly removed the right wing nut. Half the job was done.

    The left side, however, had ideas.

    Two more hours vanished. Every tool failed. The space was tighter. My left shoulder—home to a torn rotator cuff—began to flare. Each push sent a warning shot of inflammation through my arm. I was exhausted. I was furious. I was within a centimeter of victory and flirting with surrender.

    And then the thought arrived, dark and unforgivable: Call a plumber.

    He would charge $150. He would finish in three minutes. He would charge $150 even if I stood there and wept. The fact that I had already invested two hours, blood, and cartilage made calling him impossible. Layered on top of that was wounded masculinity. Sixty-four years old. Fit. A lifetime of lifting. I could not—would not—summon a professional to do a man’s job while I watched.

    Fueled by pride and spite, I ripped the toilet seat free, gaining better access but no relief. Then, in a moment of clarity bordering on madness, I reached for the wire-cutting pliers. I attacked the plastic wing nut with savage intent. Shards flew. The nut began to yield. This was not finesse. This was attrition.

    Three hours in, shoulder inflamed, nose split, I finished the job.

    What will I do next time? I will spend $99 on a Dremel with a cut-off wheel and end the ordeal in five minutes. That’s what I’ll do. When it comes to home repairs, knowledge is power—and ignorance is a slow bleed across your own bathroom floor. If I had known about the Dremel beforehand, it would have been worth every penny.

  • While Others Fell in Love, I Was Benching

    While Others Fell in Love, I Was Benching

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

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

    Then I noticed something horrifying.

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

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

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

    This may explain why girls confused and frightened me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    On Friday night, I did not date Mary Claybourne.

    I dated the bench press.

  • How Pain Turns Writers Into NPCs. 

    How Pain Turns Writers Into NPCs. 

    Writers love to repeat this creed: writers write. Every day. They sit down, stare at the blank page, and through sheer ritual force the gears to turn. In The War of Art, Stephen Pressfield insists on this daily discipline and warns of the inevitable adversary—Resistance. Resistance whispers that your writing is vain, repulsive, predictable, and hollow. Why bother? Go online. Look at shoes. Browse wristwatches. Watch YouTube reviews of sedans you’ll never buy. Burn the day on frictionless nonsense. It’s all equally meaningless, right?

    Pressfield and therapist Phil Stutz argue that this internal battle is the whole point of being alive. Pressfield calls the enemy Resistance. Stutz calls it Part X. Different names, same parasite. Its goal is not laziness but annihilation—to grind you into a nihilist, a Non Player Character who anesthetizes himself with consumer trinkets and cheap pleasures while his self-respect quietly decomposes.

    This morning, Part X arrived early and well-fed. My left shoulder throbbed from a five-month war with a torn rotator cuff and biceps tendon. Two days ago, I committed the cardinal sin: light pec flyes. Light. Humane. Respectful. Wrong. My shoulder throbbed. Apparently my shoulder has revised the Geneva Convention. I’m furious. A pec pump feels like a constitutional right. Don’t take that from me.

    But reason—cold, joyless, correct—has entered the chat. It says: you don’t need a pec pump; you need healing. If the weight room has turned hostile, pivot. Yoga. The bike. Calisthenics that whisper instead of shout. I’ve lifted my entire life, but at sixty-four my shoulder has submitted its closing argument, and it’s persuasive.

    The real danger isn’t losing bench presses. It’s waking up sore, cranky, and vulnerable—exactly the emotional state Part X thrives on. Injury lowers your defenses. Pain invites despair. Despair opens the door to distraction, and distraction is how the demon eats.

    So today I’ll keep it modest. Trader Joe’s. Groceries. Lower-body kettlebells. Rehab work that looks unimpressive but feels like loyalty to the future. May my shoulder accept this offering. More importantly, may it keep Part X from getting its teeth in me before breakfast.

  • The Man Who Broke Time: A Watch Obsession Goes Viral

    The Man Who Broke Time: A Watch Obsession Goes Viral

    Because I am known around The New Yorker offices as someone whose interest in watches occasionally elicits polite concern and the kind of side-eye usually reserved for men who won’t stop explaining cable management, it was perhaps inevitable that I would be assigned the Jeff McMahon story. When word spread that a 64-year-old writing instructor at Prospect College in Redondo Beach had triggered a watch-related disturbance of almost mythic proportions—drawing hundreds, then thousands of people into a crusade to “fix” his collection—I was dispatched to investigate how a private obsession metastasized into a civic emergency.

    I visited McMahon during winter break. His wife, a middle-school teacher, and his twin daughters, high-school sophomores, were safely elsewhere, leaving him alone with his thoughts, his watches, and whatever demons had learned to tell time. He answered the door wearing black travel pants with zippered pockets and a black T-shirt. Nearly six feet tall, close to 230 pounds, bald, square-jawed, with the squint of a man perpetually assessing lug-to-lug ratios, McMahon resembled a retired linebacker who had traded blitz packages for forum debates.

    Naturally, I clocked the watch immediately: a third-generation Seiko MM300 with a blue dial on a waffle strap.

    “It looks right on you,” I said, gesturing toward his forearm. “Especially given your build.”

    He shrugged. “It’s too late for me. I’m past swag. And honestly, the watch makes me miserable. I can’t decide if it belongs on a strap or a bracelet. I’ve switched so many times I no longer trust my own judgment. The only thing consistent about me is my inconsistency.”

    He led me into a bright, tile-heavy kitchen flooded with Southern California light. On the windowsill sat several shortwave radios, arranged among scattered lemons like some improvised altar.

    “Not just watches,” I observed. “Radios too.”

    He nodded, as if admitting to a second addiction was no longer worth defending.

    We sat at the kitchen table eating garlic hummus and rye crackers, drinking dark-roast coffee with soy milk and molasses.

    “Welcome,” he said with a tired smile, “to the House of Seiko. My man cave of madness.”

    I asked him why an entire community had mobilized to help solve his watch problem.

    “I have no idea,” he said. “It’s ridiculous. There are causes that matter. This doesn’t. I’m useless, over the hill, and fully Gollumified.”

    The saga began, he explained, at monthly meetups at Mimo’s Jewelry and Watches in Long Beach—friendly gatherings that escalated when he confessed the hobby no longer brought him joy. He wasn’t short on money; he was paralyzed by decision. Every choice felt wrong. The cognitive load became unbearable. He went to bed thinking about watches. He woke up thinking about watches.

    “Why not walk away?” I asked.

    “Because obsession doesn’t issue exit visas,” he said. “Once you’re in, the riddle feels existential. Solving it felt as urgent as founding a religion. I wanted to crack the code and then preach the gospel of happiness.”

    The intervention only made things worse. Camps formed. Seiko purists. Swiss loyalists. Minimalists. Maximalists. Arguments erupted. Then fights. A friend named Manny filmed the altercations. The videos went viral. Suddenly McMahon was a cause célèbre.

    “That’s when the watches started arriving in the mail,” he said.

    Luxury pieces worth more than his cars. None of them helped. He sold them and donated the money to charity. This, too, became content. More watches arrived. Then robberies. Burglaries. A P.O. box. A manager to process donations and deflect thieves.

    Millions eventually went to good causes. The silver lining, as they say.

    McMahon stared into his coffee. “I wish I felt redeemed. Mostly I feel disturbed—not just by my obsession, but by how easily the internet turned it into a farce. Sometimes I wonder if it had been anything else—stamps, guitars, fountain pens—would it have played out the same? Or is there something uniquely deranged about watches? Time itself? Father Time? Somehow my fixation feels disrespectful to him.”

    He paused, then added, “I have a friend who sold all his luxury watches. He wears a twenty-dollar Casio. Every day he thanks it for keeping him humble. He’s sane. That makes him my hero.”

    “You could follow his example,” I suggested. “Salvation is just a Casio away.”

    “And sell my divers?” he said flatly. “Not happening.”

    “You’d rather be miserable with expensive watches than happy with a cheap one.”

    “Exactly. Happiness is irrelevant now.”

    I studied him. “I don’t buy it,” I said. “This misery feels performative. A kind of cosplay.”

    He nodded slowly. “You’re right. But if I stop playing the miserable man, I have no idea who I’m supposed to be next. And that scares me more than any watch ever could.”

  • It Took a Village to Buy My Watch

    It Took a Village to Buy My Watch

    Last night I dreamt I was presiding over a vast communal effort devoted to a project of enormous importance—though no one, least of all me, could say what the project actually was. It had the gravity of a cathedral build or a moon launch, but the specifics were conspicuously absent. People just knew it mattered. My daughter’s childhood therapist, Olivia, was there, radiating purpose. She had invested a great deal of money into the endeavor, and I could hear others murmuring that I ought to reimburse her, which struck me as both reasonable and vaguely ominous.

    The house filled with people. Then it overflowed. There was so much movement, discussion, and civic enthusiasm that I slipped out, went to the gym, exercised—as one does in dreams when overwhelmed by responsibility—and returned to find the situation had escalated. Now there were dozens of neighbors on the lawn, standing around with the earnest posture of volunteers waiting to be assigned meaning. The sheer body heat inside the house had become an issue, so an air-conditioning repairman was summoned, as if climate control were now a municipal concern.

    I stood on the front lawn waiting for the repairman when Olivia emerged from the house and calmly announced that the project was complete. No speeches. No ribbon-cutting. Just resolution. She approached me holding a velvet pillow, and on it rested a three-thousand-dollar Seiko MM300 diver—white dial, blue markings, mounted on a sumptuous bracelet. I accepted it, stunned. I had believed myself to be in a strap-only phase, a man past bracelets, past flash. But there it was, on my wrist, and I knew instantly that this was the watch. The Holy Grail. Bracelet and all.

    The joy was real—but so was the shame. It dawned on me that I had apparently mobilized an entire community, generated heat waves, summoned tradesmen, and absorbed financial investment…all to solve a problem that was, at its core, exquisitely trivial. A watch. Beautiful, yes. All-consuming, certainly. But narcissistic? Undeniably. I woke with the uneasy recognition that even my unconscious mind knows how absurdly far I’m willing to go in pursuit of the right object—and how many people I’m prepared to inconvenience along the way.

  • How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

    How Zombies Taught Me to Do the Dishes

    I was in sixth grade when I made the worst procrastination decision of my young life: I watched Night of the Living Dead instead of doing the dishes.

    I didn’t even want to watch it. My parents were out for the evening and issued a single, modest commandment: Do whatever you want—just do the dishes. The sink was stacked with plates, bowls, pots, and pans, a greasy jungle daring me to enter. I took one look and decided I deserved a short rest before battle. I collapsed into a yellow bean bag chair, turned on the TV, and landed on Creature Features, which was broadcasting one of the most psychologically devastating films ever made.

    I’d heard about the movie at school. Kids spoke of it in hushed, reverent tones, as if surviving it were a rite of passage. Fear, apparently, was proof of greatness. How bad could it really be? I told myself this while enjoying the immediate relief of not scrubbing forks. Then the movie started: a brother and sister visiting a grave. The atmosphere curdled instantly. Something was wrong. I should have changed the channel. I didn’t. I couldn’t. Fear and curiosity locked arms and dragged me forward.

    Minutes turned into hours. I watched bodies fall apart, social order dissolve, and hope get eaten alive. The gore wasn’t just gross—it was existential. By the time the credits rolled, something essential in me had been misplaced. Innocence, for starters.

    It was nearly midnight. My parents still weren’t home. I wandered into the kitchen and stared at the sink, now radiating menace of a different kind. I was in no psychological condition to clean anything. Zombies had ruined that option. I retreated to my room, crawled into bed, and slept with the covers pulled over my head like a man hiding from the apocalypse.

    Morning arrived with consequences. My parents were furious. The dishes remained undone. I tried to explain that I had endured profound trauma at the hands of George A. Romero, but this defense carried no legal weight. I had failed on all fronts: my psyche was scarred, my parents were enraged, and the dishes were still filthy.

    That night taught me a lesson I’ve never forgotten. Procrastination lies. It promises comfort and ease but delivers a punishment far worse than the task you avoided. I could have spent thirty dull minutes cleaning plates. Instead, I spent the night traumatized by the collapse of civilization and woke up grounded. Avoiding the dishes cost me about a hundred times more than doing them ever would have.

  • How I Tried to Shrink Time to Survive

    How I Tried to Shrink Time to Survive

    In mid-December of 1967, when I was six years old, my mother had a severe bipolar episode, attempted to take her own life, and was hospitalized for a year. My brother was eighteen months old. My father was overwhelmed. The decision was made that I would live with my grandparents in Long Beach while my mother disappeared behind hospital walls and locked doors.

    I was enrolled in a new elementary school where I had no friends and made no effort to find any. I was distant and guarded, already practiced in withdrawal. I was preoccupied with my mother’s absence and with the unanswered question that haunted me daily: what version of her, if any, would come back. My grandparents were loving, steady, and kind, but Long Beach felt foreign and provisional, like a place you wait in, not a place you live. All I talked about was going home to San Jose.

    One afternoon, my grandmother tried to help me endure the waiting. She gave me a calendar and a red pen. She told me I would be going home on June 15, 1968. “Every day,” she said, “you can circle the date, and you’ll know you’re one day closer.” I flipped through the pages and felt something tighten in my chest. The calendar reminded me of movies where prisoners lie on cots in damp cells, carving days into stone, counting time as if it were a sentence rather than a passage.

    After about a week of dutiful circling, patience failed me. I circled every remaining day at once, all the way to June 15, as if the red pen were not just a marker but a lever, something that could force time to lurch forward. When my grandmother saw what I had done, she didn’t scold me. She smiled, but there was sadness in it. “You thought the pen could move time itself,” she said. “It doesn’t work that way.”

    That instinct—to accelerate the calendar, to force arrival—never left me. It hardened into a temperament. When I feel overwhelmed, I reach for control. I measure, schedule, ritualize. I distrust spontaneity. I cling to routines and clocks and daily structures as if they were railings on a narrow bridge. In many ways, I am still that six-year-old boy, circling days, believing that orderly time might tame a chaotic universe and keep me from falling apart.

    The cost of this way of living is distance from life itself. I’m reminded of Ariel Leve’s memoir An Abbreviated Life, which I’ve read twice. Leve describes growing up with a psychologically volatile mother and coping by shrinking the world—by narrowing experience, limiting exposure, contracting life until it feels survivable. That’s what I was doing with the calendar. I wasn’t counting days so much as trying to reduce terror to something measurable.

    I think I’ll listen to Leve’s book again, this time on Audible. Some stories need to be revisited, not because they change, but because you finally recognize yourself inside them.

  • Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    Always Be Closing: The Lie We Keep Buying

    “Always be closing,” Alec Baldwin snarls in Glengarry Glen Ross, playing Blake, a blustering emissary of pure cortisol sent to terrify a roomful of salesmen into obedience. Closing, he tells them, is the only thing that matters. Not effort. Not integrity. Not sanity. Close or die. The line is famous because it taps into something already rotting inside us. We don’t just want to close deals; we want to close life. Getting married is a close. Deciding on a religion is a close. Graduating college is a close. Buying a house, buying a car, settling on a diet, hitting a goal weight—each one dangles the same promise: after this, I can rest. After this, I’ll be done.

    The culture worships closers. Closers are decisive. Closers have plans. Closers stride forward with laminated confidence. Closers collect ceremonies, milestones, certificates, and Instagram captions. Closing is marketed as maturity itself—the moment when uncertainty is evicted and order takes possession of the premises. Winners close. Losers waffle. That’s the myth.

    But closing is a con, and a lazy one at that. It sells the toddler fantasy of permanent comfort: arrive somewhere and stay arrived. Life, unfortunately, does not honor this contract. It leaks, mutates, backslides, and doubles back. I once knew a couple who were desperate to permanently break up with each other. So they got married as a strategy for divorce. They believed the divorce would provide closure—clean lines, sealed chapters, emotional foreclosure. Instead, they remarried. Then divorced again. Then they remarried. Then got another divorce. Closure didn’t show up. It never does. The story simply kept going, indifferent to their paperwork.

    The same lie infects consumer life. I know a man who believed salvation came in the shape of a Rolex Explorer. Ten thousand dollars later, he congratulated himself on having found his Exit Watch—the final piece, the closing bell. Within months, he was browsing watches that made the Rolex look like an appetizer. The watch didn’t close anything. It became a monument to the futility of the attempt.

    We love the idea of closing because we are exhausted—by the volatility of the world and the chaos inside our own skulls. “Always be closing” offers a fantasy of stillness, a promise that motion can end and anxiety can be put in storage. But it’s just another pressure pitch, no more real than the sales patter Mamet skewered. Life doesn’t close. It revises, reopens, and keeps charging interest. The only thing that truly closes is the sales pitch itself.

  • Why Men Can’t Stop Writing Manifestos

    Why Men Can’t Stop Writing Manifestos

    My wife has never been one to traffic in lazy generalizations about men and women, but a few years ago she offered one observation so sharp it lodged itself in my brain. Men, she said, have a peculiar itch that women conspicuously lack: the need to write a manifesto. Not a gentle essay about waking up early to tend tomatoes and eggplant while discovering the joys of fiber and self-care. No. A manifesto is something else entirely—a doctrinal collision, an absolutist thunderclap so brimming with rectitude, so certain of its own world-historical importance, that its author feels morally obligated to broadcast it to the four corners of the earth. Silence would be selfish. Restraint would be unethical.

    A manifesto, of course, cannot emerge from a vacuum. It requires a conversion story—preferably violent. The man was once lost, deformed, wandering in a fog of ignorance. Then something happened. The cosmos intervened. He was singled out. Enlightened. Charged with a mission. His truth, having been hard-won and privately revealed, must now be universalized. To keep it to himself would be a crime against humanity. Thus the manifesto is born: part gospel, part grievance, part personal branding exercise.

    My wife was not complimenting men. She was diagnosing a particular strain of virulent egotism—one that disguises itself as sincerity and moral urgency while quietly pursuing something else: control. To impose a worldview is to dominate. To dominate is to feel powerful. Strip away the rhetoric and you find that many manifestos are not about helping others live better lives but about arranging the world so it finally stops resisting the author’s will.

    Because many men will inevitably produce many manifestos, conflict follows. Doctrines metastasize. Defenses harden. Footnotes sprout like fortifications. Converts gather. Commentaries appear. Some commentaries become so influential they eclipse the original manifesto and establish themselves as superior, corrected versions. The ecosystem expands, competitive and self-referential, like an intellectual CrossFit gym where everyone is chasing the same leaderboard.

    What my wife was really saying, I think, is that men don’t create philosophies primarily to serve others. They create them the way athletes build muscle: to compete. A manifesto is intellectual athletics—grandstanding, bluster, and chest-thumping in paragraph form. It’s less a tool for understanding the world than a way to announce dominance within it.

    Here is my confession, one I may or may not share when my wife gets home tonight: I, too, feel the pull of the manifesto. The fantasy of a grand conversion, followed by the construction of a flawless, infallible system that explains everything, is intoxicating. But if I’m honest, what draws me to that fantasy isn’t egotism so much as fear. The world is a roiling swamp of ambiguity and uncertainty. A manifesto promises certainty on a silver platter, a pacifier for the anxious adult who wants the noise to stop.

    Perhaps my wife is right. Egotism may just be fear in a tuxedo. Men, for whatever reason—biology, culture, testosterone, self-loathing—seem especially adept at projecting their inner chaos onto the world and then mistrusting it for the mess they recognize in themselves. The manifesto becomes a coping mechanism, a way to simulate control in a reality that stubbornly refuses to cooperate.

    Women don’t write manifestos because a manifesto lectures. It talks down. It closes the case. Women talk instead. Life, as they seem to understand it, is an open court—conversation, improvisation, shared meaning, surprise, trust. Men, by contrast, barricade themselves inside doctrine, shout it through a megaphone, and grow indignant when no one salutes.

    When my wife gets home, I think I’ll abandon the manifesto project. I’ll try something riskier. I’ll start a conversation. I’ll listen.