Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • The Last Tick: Breaking Up with My Watch Addiction

    The Last Tick: Breaking Up with My Watch Addiction

    Chapter 7 from The Timepiece Whisperer

    It struck me as odd—how unmoved I was by the Watch Master’s death. No sadness, no shock. Just a dry acceptance, like hearing the mail didn’t arrive. The man was in his late seventies, had chain-smoked his way through the golden age of studio recording, and looked like he’d been exhaling Marlboro ghosts for decades. Of course he died. It was inevitable, like quartz battery failure.

    And yet… I felt I should have felt more. But I was too deep in my own wrist-bound psychodrama. I wasn’t mourning a mentor—I was clawing for freedom from the slow, obsessive spiral of watch addiction. The Watch Master had passed the baton, and in his place stood a new sherpa on my horological hell-hike: Josh, the so-called Timepiece Whisperer.

    The next evening, Josh opened the door with a look that said get ready to be offended gently.

    “Bad news,” he said.

    I followed him into the kitchen. Same table. Same tension. He poured me a mug of mint tea, then hit me with it:

    “You want to add the Seiko Astron. I’ve thought about it. The answer is no. Absolutely not. You’re done. No more watches. Not now, not ever.”

    I blinked. “That’s… a bit harsh.”

    Josh didn’t blink. “It’s the truth. One more blue-dial beauty will not complete your collection—it’ll fracture it. You don’t wear formalwear. You don’t attend black-tie galas. That Astron won’t elevate your life—it’ll mock it. You’ll feel guilty for not wearing your other watches, they’ll collect dust and resentment, and you’ll spiral again. The result? Misery.”

    I looked at the floor. I already knew this. I’d said the same things to myself, in a dozen internal arguments that always ended with but maybe just one more…

    “You needed to hear it from someone else,” Josh said.

    “I hate myself for being so weak. I should have handled this alone.”

    He shrugged. “That’s what I’m here for. Left to your own devices, you’d still be googling ‘best summer watches for men over 60.’ I saved you a year of torment in two days. You’re welcome.”

    Then he pulled out a sugar cube shaped like a butterfly—absurdly whimsical for such a hardline intervention—and dropped it into my tea.

    “Close your eyes. Make a wish. Drink it down.”

    I did as instructed. The mint tea was scalding and sweet.

    He asked, “What did you wish for?”

    “That I be free from this watch-collecting hellhole and never go back.”

    He nodded. “Excellent wish.”

    I never saw Josh again.
    And I never bought another watch.

  • Vacation Nihilism: The Existential Price of That $28 Margarita

    Vacation Nihilism: The Existential Price of That $28 Margarita

    Vacation nihilism is the uniquely modern despair that creeps in when you’re supposed to be relaxing. You’re sprawled on a rental bed, digesting overpriced novelty food, staring at the ceiling fan, and asking yourself: What am I even doing with my life? The break from your daily routine doesn’t recharge you—it exposes you. With your rituals on hold, your ambitions start to look ridiculous, your projects meaningless, and your belief in humanity’s forward march into reason and tech-fueled glory? Laughable.

    You’re not wrong, entirely. The world has gone a bit mad. But your despair isn’t just philosophical—it’s biochemical. You’ve sabotaged your sleep schedule. You’ve eaten five experimental meals in three days and haven’t seen a vegetable since the airport salad bar. Your gut is staging a coup. You’re bloated, irritable, and haven’t had ten consecutive minutes alone since the trip began. Naturally, you begin to suspect your entire existence is a long-running joke with no punchline.

    Then comes the knock: Nihilism, that smug little parasite, invites himself in. And you’re too tired to fight him off. He plops down beside you and begins dismantling your life, piece by piece: your goals, your routines, your little morning affirmations—all reduced to performance art for an indifferent universe.

    For most people, this existential fog lifts after a few days back in the saddle. The routine reboots. Coffee tastes like salvation again. But not always. Sometimes you bring it back with you, like a psychological bedbug infestation. Tiny, persistent thoughts that burrow into your habits. Questions you can’t un-ask. You might look the same on the outside, but internally, the scaffolding is rusting.

    You went on vacation to unwind. Instead, you came back with nihilism spores. And no, TSA does not screen for them.

  • The Watch Hoarder’s Purge

    The Watch Hoarder’s Purge

    Chapter Five from The Watch Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    “You look miserable,” the Watch Master said, peering into the void of his backyard as we sat beneath a star-punched sky.

    “You can see me? It’s pitch black out here.”

    “I don’t need to see you. I can feel the gravitational pull of your despair. You’re radiating existential dread.”

    “That’s because you’ve assigned me an impossible task. Sell all my watches… and keep only one.”

    “Baby steps, Cassandra.”

    At that moment, a neighbor’s cat slinked in like a ghost, coiled around the Master’s ankle, and began purring like a smug little engine. He ignored it entirely.

    “You need to begin The Purge.”

    “The Purge? You mean like that movie where people commit murder once a year?”

    “No, not that kind of purge. Though honestly, your collection could use a bloodletting. I’m talking about the soul-cleansing purge. A lifestyle exfoliation. You can’t amputate your horological addiction in one go. You’ve got to build momentum. Start with the dead weight in your life.”

    He took a slow sip from a chipped mug of lukewarm coffee and gently nudged the cat away with the practiced detachment of a man who has done this a hundred times.

    “Begin,” he said, “with your eWaste.”

    “My what?”

    “You heard me. Don’t pretend you’re not hoarding defunct electronics like some midlife tech raccoon. Old flat-screens, fossilized laptops, bargain-bin Bluetooth speakers, cracked tablets, prehistoric printers, derelict keyboards—stuff that died during the Bush administration.”

    “I have… some things,” I admitted, blood draining from my face.

    “Take it all to an eWaste center. Feel the rush. The purity. Like dominoes tipping, you’ll get hooked on getting rid of things. And before long, those watches will start looking like ankle weights chained to your past.”

    A wave of dizziness came over me.

    The Master raised an eyebrow. “What now?”

    “Everything you’re saying is true. And I think I’m going to faint.”

    He shrugged with the lazy grace of a man who’d long since graduated from giving a damn. “Change or don’t. Nobody’s twisting your arm. But if you’re still clutching that broken Casio from 2009 like it’s a family heirloom, maybe it’s time to rethink your priorities.”

    He stretched his limbs and let out an operatic yawn. Just then, a massive crow descended on the fence post, tilted its head like a Greek oracle, and let out a guttural, gravelly call: “Puuurge. Puuurge. Puuurge.”

    The Master didn’t flinch. He simply glanced at the bird and muttered, “Everyone wants a line in this story.”

    And with that, he dismissed me into the night—to wrestle with my demons and the unbearable burden of excess.

  • Hugh Hefner’s Watchbox from Hell

    Hugh Hefner’s Watchbox from Hell

    Chapter Three from The Watch Whisperer of Redondo Beach


    When I got home, I collapsed into a dream-heavy sleep—the kind you don’t choose but fall into like a trapdoor.

    I dreamed I was back with the Watch Master, only this time we were in a cave—his new lair, apparently—where flickering monitors lined the stone walls like cursed flat-screens. Each displayed a parallel universe, a version of me shaped entirely by my watch collection.

    One screen showed me with a massive, vulgar collection: gold bezels, diamond indices, stainless steel bracelets so chunky they could anchor a yacht. In that reality, I was obese. Bloated. A Las Vegas lounge lizard with a double chin, a sprayed-on tan, and a wig styled into a pompadour so high it had its own zip code. A gold-plated microphone dangled from my sweaty fingers as I crooned like Elvis, Tom Jones, and Michael Bolton—simultaneously. Around my neck: ropes of gold. On my wrist: a diamond-studded Rolex that practically screamed for an exorcism.

    When I opened my mouth to speak, no words came out—just a guttural, distorted sound, like a demon gargling battery acid. I had abandoned my family. I lived in a velvet-curtained grotto that looked like Hefner’s afterlife man-cave. I wasn’t just a parody of myself. I was a possession.

    That’s when I woke up—slick with sweat, lungs full of dread. But the nightmare wasn’t over. I could still feel him—it—the beast version of me, 300 pounds of ego and regret, pressing down on my mattress. The sag was real. I swear it. My bed bowed like I was hosting a sumo wrestler from the spirit world.

    Later that night, I sat at the Watch Master’s kitchen table and told him the whole thing while he sipped from a chipped mug under the soft glow of moonlight. His gaunt face lit up with delight. He laughed—not cruelly, but knowingly.

    “Textbook,” he said. “You’re a classic case. A fractured soul, split by overexposure to bezel lust. Watch addiction creates avatars. You’ve conjured a grotesque mirror of your worst impulses. The doppelgänger is real, and he’s hungry.”

    “What do I do?” I asked, sounding more like a haunted child than a man who once justified paying four figures for a dive watch he never actually dove with.

    The Master leaned back and cracked his neck like a man preparing to file a warranty claim on your soul. “You ever hear the saying, ‘You’ve got to go to hell before you get to heaven?’”

    I nodded.

    “Well,” he said, rising slowly, “That’s where you are. Right on schedule.”

    “Can you be more specific?”

    “Later. Right now, just hearing your dream has worn me out. It’s not just the nightmare—it’s you. Your whole aura is exhausting. You radiate crisis. Come back tomorrow, same time. We’ll discuss logistics.”

    And just like that, he disappeared down a hallway, leaving me with my own haunted watch box, and the question of whether I was still awake—or just in a deeper layer of the dream.

  • Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Last night, my wife asked me to handle a sacred domestic rite of passage: haul a trunk-load of obsolete electronics to the Gaffey S.A.F.E. Recycle Collection Center in San Pedro. “They open at 9 a.m.,” she said, which is code for: Don’t sleep in.

    So I dutifully loaded my Honda Accord with a hall of shame—old radios, half-dead fans, ghosted iPads, prehistoric laptops, orphaned computer speakers, a humidifier that wheezed its last breath in 2018, and enough acid-leaking batteries to qualify as a small environmental disaster.

    By morning, I punched the address into my phone, merged onto the 110 South, and exited Pacific Avenue, driving through an industrial no-man’s-land of rusting warehouses, improvised shelters, and overgrown brush—a Stephen King set piece waiting to happen. After bouncing over railroad tracks and veering onto a gravel path flanked by nothing but dirt and faint regret, I arrived at 8:50.

    The “facility” was a glorified tarp tent squatting in front of a cinder-block warehouse. A small line of cars idled ahead of me like penitents outside a confessional. Signs warned against dumping poisons, spoiled crops, medical waste, firearms, and, refreshingly, detonation materials of any kind. A second sign warned against exiting your vehicle, eating, or drinking—because apparently the mere whiff of your lukewarm coffee might trigger a chemical reaction that could incinerate the South Bay.

    At one point, a confused driver from Washington state cut in front, realized he was in the wrong dystopian checkpoint, U-turned, and peeled off down the gravel road, leaving a dust plume that coated our windshields like nuclear ash.

    By nine o’clock, two dozen cars were idling behind me in what now resembled the opening act of an eco-thriller. A cheerful woman in an orange vest began making her rounds, clipboard in hand. She asked what I was dropping off, and I gave her the rundown—my sad parade of malfunctioning tech. I suspect her job was twofold: confirm I wasn’t smuggling Chernobyl-grade waste, and quietly profile whether I looked like the kind of guy who dumps bodies with his broken humidifiers. Somewhere nearby, I imagined, there was a man with a headset and a sidearm watching from a repurposed FEMA trailer.

    Finally, I popped the trunk. Uniformed workers retrieved my gadgets with grim efficiency. I thanked them. They returned my gratitude like seasoned pallbearers—calm, practiced, unfazed.

    Unburdened, I pulled away from the hazmat drive-thru, feeling 50 pounds lighter and slightly radioactive. I had fulfilled my civic duty to both my marriage and the planet.

  • The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    Last night, I dreamed I lived in heaven—and like most people blessed beyond comprehension, I had absolutely no idea.

    The dream began in a hectic classroom, as these things often do. I was teaching at a strange college campus. The students were more postgrad in their maturity and engagement than freshman—mature, sharp, and fully caffeinated on the joy of learning.

    We were deep in discussion, when I glanced out the window and saw rain falling in soft sheets. I drifted, just for a second, and in that brief lapse, the class was commandeered—gracefully—by one of my more opinionated students, Tim Miller, moonlighting as a podcaster and self-appointed co-professor.

    Tim, without missing a beat, told everyone to take out the assigned blue textbook. The expensive one. The one I myself had never read. I looked at the book with the guilt of a host who’s never tasted his own hors d’oeuvres. Trying to recover, I asked what they thought. They said it was “okay”—the academic kiss of death. I nodded solemnly and was mercifully saved by the end of class.

    I looked at the exit and saw a nearsighted colleague half my age pushing a fleet of book carts. I offered to help. He kindly accepted my offer—but by the time I reached the carts, he had finished everything himself. He waved goodbye, like a benevolent young professor who didn’t need me after all.

    As I walked through the corridor, I spotted something. A green coffee mug I’d abandoned earlier on a table, shimmering like a forgotten relic. I scooped it up and raced across campus in the rain, placing it delicately on the windowsill of the library. Two librarians emerged, eyes wide with wonder, as if I’d returned the Ark of the Covenant. They smiled as if I’d done something sacred.

    Onward. The rain kept falling, warm and tropical, more blessing than burden. I reached for my phone–the same emerald green as the coffee mug–now coated in fine beach sand. I frantically wiped it clean, restoring it to its gleaming perfection.

    I wasn’t driving. I never did. I preferred walking the five miles home, savoring the trek. In the distance, my residence came into view: three mountain-sized pyramids rising into the mist, woven from purple and gold stone, arranged in a mesmerizing zigzag pattern. I’d always loved purple—no surprise there—but for the first time, I saw the gold properly. I normally detest gold. Too garish. But this gold? This gold was alive. Deep, radiant, humming with mystery.

    I realized, with a kind of thudding wonder, that I lived there. Among the pyramids. In the mist. In heaven. And somehow, until that moment, I’d never truly seen it.

    Then I woke up, soaked not in rain but contrition, and wondered: How much of my real life do I miss by failing to see what’s already shimmering around me? What marvels have I demoted to the mundane? What if heaven isn’t a destination but a perception we keep forgetting to use?

  • Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    In the early ’90s, I had a student whose entire identity was shackled to the number on a stadiometer. I don’t recall the exact figure, but he was somewhere south of five-foot-five—a detail that tormented him like a Greek curse. What I do remember is that he was a strikingly handsome kid. Slender, well-proportioned, with the kind of face you’d expect to see in a Calvin Klein ad, not in a therapy session about height insecurity. But none of that mattered. He couldn’t see past the measuring tape in his head.

    It was during one of our writing lab sessions—those clattering dens of early-’90s Macintoshes, all beige and humming, where I played roving editor and motivational coach—that he confided in me. Class was winding down, students trickling out like post-cardio gym rats, and this nineteen-year-old lingered behind with something heavy to unload.

    He told me that being short felt like a life sentence. But the real damage, he confessed, came not from his height—but from the manic overcompensation it inspired. When talking in groups, he’d find the highest available perch to stand on—benches, stairs, anything to give him the illusion of height. He wore shoe lifts, which he kept hidden in his closet like a box of shame. But worst of all? He trained himself to walk perpetually on his tiptoes.

    Yes, tiptoes. Every day, every step. As if sneaking through life as a burglar of inches.

    Eventually, his spine cried uncle. The tiptoe act wrecked his back, forced him into surgery, and—here’s the gut punch—cost him an entire inch. In his effort to stretch himself, he ended up shorter. He admitted he hated himself for it, and I believed him.

    Looking at him—this good-looking, intelligent kid—it struck me just how dangerous our internal narratives can be. We live so much in our heads that our perception becomes more powerful than reality. A stray comment in middle school morphs into a life-defining trauma. A mirror becomes a courtroom. And the verdict? Never good enough.

    His story is a tragic little parable of body dysmorphia: how the seeds of insecurity, if left unchecked, sprout into weeds that choke reason, and in our desperate attempts to “fix” ourselves, we often end up disfiguring what was never broken.

    Our bodies are our canvases. And oh, how savagely the world critiques them. Some of us starve. Some inject ourselves with synthetic youth. Some spend fortunes on surgeries that leave us looking like Botoxed sphinx cats. And some, like my student, ruin their spines to gain half an inch that no one but they ever noticed.

    We’re all vulnerable to the feedback loop. When I’m lean and muscular on YouTube, the algorithm sings. I get compliments. DMs. Admiring questions about my training and my “age-defying” lifestyle. When I’m twenty pounds heavier? Crickets. I become one more bloated has-been talking into the void.

    Yes, our bodies are our canvas. But if we’re not careful, our efforts to “improve” that canvas can become self-mutilation masquerading as self-love.

  • How Losing 20 Pounds Made Me Rethink My Entire Watch Collection (and My Life)

    How Losing 20 Pounds Made Me Rethink My Entire Watch Collection (and My Life)

    Yesterday I filmed a 26-minute YouTube video on my main channel—ostensibly about watches. That was the bait. But somewhere between adjusting my camera and admiring my newly lean frame (twenty pounds down since April, thank you very much), I realized I wasn’t really talking about watches at all. I was talking about aging, restraint, identity, and how not to let your inner teenager run the damn show.

    The video was titled something like “My Four Watch Goals at Sixty-Four,” which sounds practical until you realize that my goals weren’t horological—they were existential. The first one? Stop being so maudlin. I actually said the word, spelled it out like a substitute teacher on a caffeine bender, and gave a definition. Maudlin: emotional excess masquerading as depth, the adolescent urge to turn life into performance art just so you can feel something.

    To illustrate, I offered up a formative trauma: being sixteen, watching Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, and weeping—actually weeping—when he transformed into Lou Ferrigno’s green rage monster. It wasn’t just TV. It was catharsis. I was an Olympic weightlifter-slash-bodybuilder-slash-piano prodigy who didn’t know what to do with all the emotion I’d stuffed under my pecs and sonatas. Watching Bixby morph into a snarling demigod gave me permission to feel. In my forties, I channeled that same melodrama into wearing oversized diver watches—big, bold, and absurdly heroic, as if my wrist were auditioning for a Marvel reboot. That, too, was maudlin cosplay. Now I’m trying something radical: maturity.

    Goal two? Quit being an enabler. I admitted that, like it or not, I’m an influencer. I don’t collect in a vacuum. Every time I flex a new piece, it’s like handing out free permission slips to fellow addicts. So I’ve decided to use my powers for good—or at least for moderation.

    Goal three: Stay fit, get bloodwork, be a warrior in plain clothes. The watch isn’t the main course. It’s the garnish. If I’m going to wear something worth noticing, I should have the body and the biomarkers to back it up. Otherwise, I’m just a gilded potato.

    And finally, goal four: Minimalist watch heroes. The quiet monks of the community who own one to three watches and seem perfectly content. They’re my North Stars. They aren’t buying watches out of panic, nostalgia, or identity crises—they’re grounded, self-possessed, wise. I envy them. I aspire to be one of them. I’m not there yet, but I’m squinting in their direction.

    Honestly, I assumed the video would tank. My viewers tend to want horological eye-candy, not existential reflection wrapped in fitness updates. But to my surprise, the response was overwhelming—close to a thousand views on day one, dozens of comments. People thanked me. Some said they were booking doctor appointments. Others said they were starting diets. I’m fourteen years into making YouTube videos, and this might be the one I’m proudest of.

    Because the truth is, most watch YouTubers are just dressing up emotional poverty in brushed stainless steel. They get maudlin about bezels and bracelets, desperate to out-hype each other in a gaudy attention economy. It’s exhausting. What people really want—what they’re starving for—is someone speaking like a human being. No curation. No affectation.

    I ended my video with a confession: I’m still that sixteen-year-old kid. And if you cue up The Lonely Man theme from The Incredible Hulk, the one where David Banner walks down the rainy sidewalk in soft focus, I will—without shame—start crying. Again. Because some emotions don’t age. They just find quieter places to hide.

  • One Day, One House, No Excuses

    One Day, One House, No Excuses

    This morning, I brewed a pot of delicious Stumptown French roast—molten, bitter, potent—and padded over to my computer feeling dangerously wholesome. A good man with good intentions. Which, of course, is always the start of a problem. I was toying with the idea of living more virtuously: dialing back the animal fat, leaning into tempeh and nutritional yeast, pretending a plant-based diet isn’t just a long goodbye to flavor. You know, the usual summer resolutions—less cheese, more clarity.

    Somewhere between the aroma of roasted beans and my first click of the mouse, I felt something resembling courage. Not the real, bare-knuckled kind, but the kind that sneaks in when the house is quiet and you haven’t yet sabotaged yourself with toast. I thought: Gird up thy loins like a man. (Who says that anymore? Besides prophets and people named Chet.) But still, the idea stuck. Maybe I was finally ready to stop flinching and start living with actual conviction—about food, fitness, morality, and cholesterol.

    And yet I know myself. Talk is cheap. I have spent years writing grocery lists for lives I never lived. What matters is performance.

    Which brings us to today. My summer has officially begun. My wife and teenage daughters are off to Disneyland—a place I regard with the same warmth I reserve for colonoscopies and TikTok. They know this, and mercifully leave me out of the Mouseketeer pilgrimage. Which means: the house is mine.

    I have made a pact with myself. Today, I will submit my final grades, mount the Schwinn Airdyne for a 60-minute sufferfest (estimated burn: 650-750 calories, depending on whether I channel Rocky Balboa or Mister Rogers), and I will rehearse my piano composition—tentatively titled Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Madness. If all goes well, I’ll record it and upload it to my YouTube channel, where it will be watched by six people and a bot from Belarus.

    Alone time is rare in a house shared with twin teenage girls, a wife, and the occasional haunting presence of someone asking what’s for dinner. I daydream of a private studio—soundproofed, monk-like, adorned with a grand ebony Yamaha piano and maybe a faint aura of genius. Instead, I have today: a suburban cosplay fantasy in which I pretend to be a cloistered artist, instead of a middle-aged man in gym shorts wondering if tempeh is as bioavailable as the vegan influencers claim it is.

    And yet… it’s enough. Let the performance begin.

  • The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    The Pilgrim, the Mansion, and the Flying Death Rig

    Last night, I dreamed I worked at a surreal hybrid of a college campus and an amusement park—the kind of place where tenured professors could file paperwork in one building and ride a log flume in another. Picture syllabus deadlines and cotton candy coexisting. Naturally, I was late for both.

    Meanwhile, several miles away in my old neighborhood, Marcus, a childhood friend, decided he’d had enough of modern civilization. His exit wasn’t dramatic—no manifesto, no angry blog post—just a quiet pilgrimage beginning in front of my house. The weather was unreasonably perfect. Sunlight filtered through air that smelled like rose petals and eternal spring. Think Garden of Eden meets Orange County real estate brochure.

    So why would Marcus leave paradise? We didn’t know. But my neighbors and I were offended by the sheer moral audacity of it. His journey felt like a judgment—like he’d stared into the hollow eyes of our HOA and whispered, “You people are dead inside.” Naturally, we chased him. Not to stop him, but to prove we were decent people too. We jogged after him, waving metaphysical CVs and shouting, “We recycle! We make our own salad dressing!”

    But Marcus was too far ahead. By the time I arrived at the college-amusement park, he was gone. I retreated to my professor’s office to catch up on what dreams insist professors do: paperwork. That’s when Mike arrived—a former student, Navy SEAL, and time-traveling spirit guide from the 1990s. He led me to a house in Buena Park, once his father’s, now transfigured by dream logic into a mansion of staggering beauty, where I apparently lived a life of joy and ease in another dimension. It was, quite simply, the life I never knew I had but now mourned like a phantom limb. I was flooded with regret. Why did I leave that parallel mansion where I was whole, radiant, and probably never had to grade a single freshman essay?

    Then the sun set, and—as dreams do—I stopped being a professor and morphed into some kind of blue-collar rig worker, one of four men hauling cargo across the freeways of this theme park universe. At breakneck speed, we clung to the roof of a truck, flying over the 5 freeway like a band of deluded daredevils. I alone had the courage (or sanity) to question this arrangement. “You know,” I said, wind slapping my face, “we don’t have to die tonight. There’s an interior cabin. With seats.”

    At first, they mocked me—because apparently, dreamland logic still includes workplace hazing—but eventually, they gave in. We climbed down into the safety of the rig, like cowards, or people who enjoy not being flung across asphalt.

    As I relaxed, I thought once more about that mansion in Buena Park, that shadow life where I wasn’t trying to prove my worth or cling to cargo. A life of belonging, not striving. Then I woke up, ate a bowl of buckwheat groats, drank my Sumatra coffee, and wondered what it all meant.