Cinemorphosis

Tag: life

  • The Frogman and the Music of Atlantis

    The Frogman and the Music of Atlantis

    My junior year of high school was my “Deacon Blues” year. I wore it like a religious creed. The song played, and I nodded along as if I’d been admitted to some nocturnal order of the misunderstood. Only decades later did I realize the joke was on me. The narrator isn’t a tragic hero; he’s a suburban man with a good stereo and a better imagination, building a flattering alternate reality to anesthetize his boredom. What I mistook for transcendence was mood lighting. I wasn’t ascending; I was dimming the room.

    Satire thrives on mockery because it exposes the soft spots we’d rather not touch. But self-mockery can metastasize. It can turn your life into a punchline so comprehensive that nothing is left standing—not even the truth that your choices matter. High stakes persist whether you acknowledge them or not. We are, to put it plainly, creatures who want more than a clever story about ourselves. We want something that holds when the music stops.

    For that, I have to go back a year. I was a sophomore who encountered “Zoom,” written by Lionel Richie and Ronald LaPread of The Commodores. The song arrived like a quiet command. You can hear the Gospel in its bones—the upward pull, the refusal to collapse into self. The voice in “Zoom” isn’t asking for a better seat at the table; it’s asking for the table to be remade so everyone can eat. It’s not self-improvement. It’s a prayer for shared elevation.

    I remember where I was when it came on—KSFX, KSOL—the speakers on my Realistic Radio Shack clock radio doing their best, the world suddenly holding its breath. I stopped. Not figuratively. I stopped. The song spoke to my heart: Be better. Not for your reputation, not for your résumé—for people. That’s a different order of demand.

    That same year, “Voyage to Atlantis” by The Isley Brothers performed a similar operation. It promised return—home not as geography but as fidelity, as a place you carry and keep. Between those two songs was a paradox I could feel even if I couldn’t name it: you root yourself in a clean intention, and from that grounding you rise. No theatrics required. No persona. Just alignment.

    Listening to them felt like church without the building. Something gathered. Something clarified. You left with less noise and more direction.

    What is music, after all, if not the part of life that refuses translation and still manages to tell the truth?

    Which brings me to an embarrassment I’ll risk anyway: in watch circles, we talk about a “grail” watch that will “sing” on the wrist. It’s a ridiculous phrase—until it isn’t. Because this hulking slab of resin I’m wearing—the G-Shock Frogman—does something adjacent to that metaphor. It doesn’t produce music. It points to it. It behaves like a reference, a small, stubborn reminder that there is a cleaner version of me available if I’d like to stop auditioning and start choosing.

    The Frogman is not an upgrade. It’s an accusation shaped like a tool. It suggests a man with a steadier pulse, a man less interested in narrating his life and more interested in living it. A man who could hear “Zoom” and “Voyage to Atlantis” and respond the way that sophomore did—by stopping, by listening, by letting the moment ask something of him.

    I don’t need to recover youth. I need to recover that pause—the willingness to be addressed by something better and not immediately turn it into a story about myself.

    The songs didn’t change. I did.

    The question is whether I can change back.

  • The Horological Substitution Effect

    The Horological Substitution Effect

    I’ve long suspected that my late-night commiseration with other men about watches was not fellowship but camouflage. We called it passion—dial textures, lume performance, the moral superiority of mechanical over quartz—but beneath the jargon was something quieter and more embarrassing: loneliness.

    Lately, a more unsettling thought has taken hold. My transformation into the Frogman—the resin-clad apostle of atomic time—may not be about horology at all. It may be an attempt to imagine myself as a man who exudes the kind of charisma that draws an abundance of real friendships. Not forum acquaintances. Not usernames. Real people who might, inexplicably, choose to spend time with me.

    I have a name for this pathology: the Horological Substitution Effect. It’s the quiet exchange a man makes when real connection feels too risky—he trades the messy, unpredictable labor of friendship for the controlled ritual of online hobby talk. The watch becomes a proxy for intimacy. The forum becomes a stage where vulnerability is replaced with specifications. It looks like connection. It feels like connection. It isn’t.

    My suspicions hardened into something closer to fact when my wife began sending me short videos of comedy skits about a subject that has no business being funny: the epidemic of friendless adult men. The jokes land with the precision of an indictment. Get off your ass. Build a life that includes other human beings. Not for amusement. For survival. For the family.

    The problem is I don’t know how.

    My friendships didn’t end dramatically. They dissolved. Quietly. Gradually. Like hair circling a drain until there’s nothing left to catch. I haven’t met a friend for a movie and a meal in over a decade. Solitude didn’t arrive as a crisis; it moved in, rearranged the furniture, and declared itself permanent. Worse, it feels justified. I operate under a private assumption so efficient it barely needs words: no one would choose this. Why would they? Friendship is an investment, and I’ve already decided I’m a bad bet. Rejection is neatly avoided by never extending the invitation. It’s surrender, dressed up as self-respect.

    If I trace the origin, I land somewhere around 2005. Dinner with my cousin in downtown Los Angeles. Afterward, he wanted me to follow him to Silver Lake for coffee and more conversation. It wasn’t the original plan, just a spontaneous thought. I felt the anxiety spike, sharp and immediate. Dinner had been the contract; anything beyond it felt like a breach. I went along, but badly. He noticed. He never asked again. He went on to build a life dense with friendships, a calendar that requires pruning. I refined a different skill: leaving early. It’s part of my neurosis and a condition called Extension Anxiety Reflex: the immediate surge of discomfort triggered when a social encounter exceeds its original scope, prompting withdrawal, compliance-with-resistance, or emotional shutdown. The reflex prioritizes escape over connection, often at the exact moment intimacy might begin.

    I inherited the inclination to not maintain friendships. My parents spent the last decades of their lives without friends. My father outsourced social contact through his second wife but never rebuilt what he’d lost. My mother claimed acquaintances the way a diner claims rapport with a waiter—polite, transactional, ultimately imaginary. Loneliness wasn’t diagnosed in our house; it was modeled. It wore the mask of normalcy. I didn’t choose to avoid friendships so much as follow a script. 

    My parents weren’t bad people. They were self-involved, chemically dependent, emotionally unavailable. My father once told me, with the bluntness of a man who had stopped editing himself, that if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t have children. People recoil at that. I didn’t. It sounded like a sentence I’d already been living. My mother oscillated between warmth and collapse, her depressions so severe she vanished into hospitals while I vanished into my grandparents’ home. Childhood became less a place to grow than a place to endure.

    So I adapted. I became self-sufficient. I entertained myself. I removed the need for others before they could remove themselves from me. Isolation wasn’t a failure; it was a system—efficient, predictable, safe.

    In my twenties, desire disrupted the system. I wanted relationships, so I built a version of myself that could secure them. Talkative. Confident. Funny. A man with timing. It worked. Women believed in the performance. So did I. But the performance had no depth. It couldn’t support anything real. Relationships collapsed under the combined weight of my anxiety and self-absorption. I could attract; I could not attach. I had charisma without the anchor: the ability to generate attraction through confidence, humor, and social fluency while lacking the emotional grounding required to sustain a relationship. I could initiate connection but could not stabilize it, resulting in repeated relational collapse.

    That hasn’t entirely changed. I can still be charming in controlled doses. Colleagues enjoy me in passing. I generate conversation the way a barista generates foam—pleasant, temporary, decorative. But conversation is not friendship. Friendship requires escalation. Risk. The unthinkable act of asking someone to step outside the script and spend time with you. That’s where the system fails. I assume the answer will be no, so I never ask the question. It’s a perfect loop: I avoid rejection by guaranteeing isolation.

    This morning, sitting in my car waiting to take my daughters to school, I nearly performed another ritual. I reached for my watch, ready to photograph it for Instagram—a small sacrifice to the gods of trivial validation. For a moment, I considered it. Then the idea turned on me. The absurdity was too clean to ignore. As if a watch photo could compensate for a hollow social life. As if attention could masquerade as connection. It felt like eating sugar to cure hunger and calling the crash nourishment.

    So I sat there instead.

    I thought about those videos my wife keeps sending. They’re funny the way a diagnosis is funny—because it’s accurate. She’s worried. She should be.

    The truth is not complicated. It’s just unflattering. I have built a life optimized to avoid risk, and in doing so, I have optimized it to avoid connection. And here’s the irony that would be funny if it weren’t so exact: as the self-appointed Frogman—the man of action, the avatar of decisiveness—I am acutely aware of the contradiction. The Frogman is not a watch; it is an aspiration. Like Steely Dan’s suburbanite Deacon, dreaming of escape through saxophone and whiskey, I imagine a version of myself that moves, acts, engages—a man who shows up, who serves, who answers the call.

    A man who doesn’t leave early.

  • The Frogman Won’t Let the World Forget Me

    The Frogman Won’t Let the World Forget Me

    No one pulls you aside and says it plainly, so you discover it the hard way: approaching your mid-sixties is not a dignified procession but a slow-motion loss of fluency. Not in language—you still speak English—but in the dialect of the present. You drop references like breadcrumbs—Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, All in the Family—and watch them land with the soft thud of irrelevance. Blank faces greet you like unresponsive kiosks. You begin to understand that your cultural currency has been quietly demonetized.

    The misalignment spreads. You assume appliances are built with the stubborn dignity of the past, only to discover they’re engineered like disposable cutlery. You touch them wrong and they sulk; you look at them sternly and they fracture. Somewhere along the way, durability became a nostalgic rumor.

    Then the body joins the conspiracy. You can ingest oceans of omega-3s, lecture yourself about triglycerides, and still your short-term memory leaks like a cracked vessel. You misplace socks—on the couch. You forget the final episode of the crime series you were definitely going to finish. You overlook the Costco-sized battalion of trash bags stationed in the garage. You grind tomorrow’s coffee beans and wake up convinced you didn’t. Each lapse is trivial; together they assemble a quiet indictment. The evidence accumulates like unopened mail—thick, accusatory, impossible to ignore.

    At some point you recognize the composite image: a man slightly out of phase with the world, blinking as if the lighting has changed without notice. You flash your senior discount at the box office with a strange mix of pride and disbelief, like a badge you didn’t apply for but now must wear.

    Of course, you resist. You lift. You count protein with monastic zeal—two hundred grams a day, as if amino acids can negotiate with time. You clang kettlebells in the garage and polish your physique into a version that might pass for forty-four under forgiving conditions. It’s a valiant performance—convincing in daylight, flattering in mirrors.

    Then night driving happens.

    Depth perception turns traitor. Headlights arrive as surgical instruments. Streetlamps slice into your retinas with the precision of interrogation. The illusion collapses in a single commute. Biology, unimpressed by your discipline, resumes control of the narrative.

    And so you become, whether you like it or not, a public artifact of time passing—a walking reminder to the young that the clock is not theoretical. To them, you are the human equivalent of a neighbor’s dog barking at six in the morning: persistent, a little unnerving, impossible to mute. You do not mean to be instructive, but you are.

    Faced with this, I did what any reasonable man would do: I recruited a muse. The narrator of “Deacon Blues”—that suburban alchemist who turns disappointment into velvet—became my companion. I gave him a name, because a man like that demands one: Deacon. Each night he reinvents himself as a nocturnal artist, steeped in jazz and whiskey, sustained by the elegance of his own delusions.

    I don’t drink. I don’t haunt smoky rooms. My vice is different, and it is, in its own way, just as theatrical. I cosplay.

    My chosen persona is Action Man—the British cousin of G.I. Joe, the hero of my childhood in Nairobi, where toy stores stocked imperial variations of American fantasies. In those days, I directed epics in the backyard. I rigged a clothes hanger to a fishing line strung between trees and sent my plastic hero ziplining into danger, rescuing hostages from villains who existed only because I needed them to. The yard teemed with chameleons and carpenter bees; it might as well have been a jungle. I was the director, the stunt coordinator, the audience. Action Man never hesitated. Action Man did not forget where he put his socks.

    Now I find myself wondering whether my recent conversion to the G-Shock Frogman is less a purchase than a recall notice from that earlier life. A resin watch, oversized and unapologetic, arrives like a toy that learned how to tell time with atomic authority. Five hundred dollars for a device that looks like it escaped a childhood—but feels, on the wrist, like a command.

    The timing is suspicious. Irrelevance looms. Retirement whispers. The culture shrugs. And my unconscious, unimpressed by all of it, reaches backward and drags something forward. I did not want to dim. I wanted ignition. I wanted to be in my prime, or at least in the vicinity of it. I wanted, absurdly and sincerely, to be a man of action.

    So here I am, somewhere between Deacon’s barstool and a backyard zipline, imagining a descent into danger, hostages to save, a purpose that announces itself clearly and requires no explanation. The ravine is imaginary. The urgency is not.

  • From Analog Watch Devotee to Digital Convert

    From Analog Watch Devotee to Digital Convert

    For decades I carried a tidy prejudice: digital time was vulgar—soulless, phone-adjacent, a betrayal of my analog faith. I was a man of brushed steel and sweeping seconds, a parishioner in the Church of the Diver. Quartz was for commuters. Resin was for children.

    Then I strapped on the G‑Shock Frogman and looked down.

    The numbers were unapologetic—big, bright, exact. No squinting, no interpretive dance with minute hands. Just time, delivered with atomic certainty. It wasn’t charming. It was correct. And I found myself loving it in the way you love a tool that does not negotiate.

    The comparison arrived uninvited: the muscle cars of my youth—Mustangs, Barracudas—beautiful, yes, but also squeaking relics with climate control that felt like a rumor. You don’t drive them so much as you endure them. Then you slide into a modern car and the world seals itself around you—quiet, precise, obedient. That’s what the Frogman felt like. I hadn’t upgraded my watch; I had defected to a better century.

    Here’s the heresy: I now resent my analog watches. I resent the squint, the guesswork, the artisanal inaccuracy sold at luxury prices. Why, exactly, is it acceptable that a watch costing thousands loses minutes while this rubberized amphibian syncs itself with the sky?

    I don’t know what’s happening to me, and I no longer pretend to be in charge of it. What I do know is this: the Frogman isn’t leaving my wrist.

    Colleagues of the watch faith, witness a Tribal Migration Event: the moment a collector crosses a border he swore was permanent—mechanical to quartz, analog to digital—and discovers he prefers the other side. It begins as a fling, a novelty purchase, a “let’s see.” It ends as a relocation. The shock is not the watch; it’s the realization that your identity was a costume with good lighting.

    The casualties are lined up in a box. My high-end Seiko divers—polished, dignified, expensively nostalgic—sit like former lovers who’ve been ghosted without explanation.

    “How could you?” they seem to ask.

    “You’re dead to me,” I reply, with a briskness that surprises us all.

    At this point the relationship is no longer metaphorical. It has crossed into the psychological, possibly the spiritual. There may be paperwork.

    Let me concede the obvious: on a man my age, the Frogman is not flattering. It doesn’t whisper style; it shouts evidence. It looks like something a concerned relative might mention to a professional. And yet—there it remains, immovable.

    Because something happened.

    Not a gentle drift. Not a tasteful adjustment.

    A break.

    I felt it first in small betrayals of habit. My appetite tightened its belt. Three meals, no raids. No twilight foraging expeditions in the kitchen under the pretense of “just checking.” Focus sharpened. Discipline, that elusive houseguest, unpacked its bags.

    Then the house itself changed.

    No announcements were made, but the atmosphere shifted. The eye-rolling ceased. The quiet demotion—from patriarch to eccentric roommate—reversed itself without ceremony. I had, somehow, acquired gravity. Decisions began to look like decisions rather than impulses in costume.

    And then—this is the part that refuses explanation—my nightmares stopped.

    Not improved. Not reduced.

    Stopped.

    For years they ran nightly, a private cinema of dread with excellent attendance. Then the Frogman arrived and the theater closed. Lights out. Eviction. Now I sleep. I dream in color. I jog through fields of berries and, in a voice suspiciously like John Lennon, I sing, “I am the Frogman.”

    Explain that.

    A resin watch—battery, rubber strap, digital readout—accomplished what therapy, discipline, and time politely declined to do. Part of me wants to accept the miracle without inquiry. When something rescues you from overeating, ridicule, and nocturnal terror, you don’t interrogate it. You nod. You say thank you. You keep the artifact close and your questions at a respectful distance.

    If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.
    If you don’t understand the blessing, don’t analyze it.

    Unfortunately, I’m not built for reverence without curiosity. I want mechanisms. I want causes. I want a diagram that explains how a mass-produced object rewired my habits, upgraded my household rank, and shut down my night terrors like a switch.

    That investigation is what lies ahead—the study of what I can only call the Frogman Elixir Effect: a transformation so complete the purchaser no longer quite exists.

    I am not wearing the watch.

    The watch is wearing me. I am the Frogman.

    The migration is complete.

  • The Frogman Conversion: When Lightning Strikes

    The Frogman Conversion: When Lightning Strikes

    One of the great American confessions disguised as a groove, “Deacon Blues” by Steely Dan, is not really about jazz or whiskey or late-night dignity. It’s about a suburban man who has quietly accepted his own smallness and now anesthetizes himself with a cinematic fantasy: he is, in his mind, an outlaw artist—unbought, ungoverned, beautifully doomed. In reality, he’s a man in a cul-de-sac rehearsing rebellion between errands.

    The song doesn’t mock him; it does something crueler and more elegant—it turns his self-deception into something hauntingly beautiful, a melody so smooth you almost miss the fact that it’s scoring a life half-lived. That’s why it lingers. It flatters the listener even as it exposes him.

    The song’s narrator is what we might call a Pinot Noir Outlaw: a man who performs a life of danger and artistic defiance through carefully curated indulgences—jazz, late-night drinks, vague melancholy—while remaining safely embedded in routine and privilege.

    And I’m not exempt. I recognize the man immediately because I am another citizen pacing the enclosure of my own habits, staging elaborate internal revolutions that never quite breach the walls. I don’t crave improvement; improvement is bureaucratic. I crave demolition. I want the current version of myself revoked, replaced, struck by lightning and rewritten. Spare me the incremental victories—slightly better blood pressure, a more respectable triglyceride count, LDL nudged into compliance. That’s not transformation; that’s paperwork.

    What I want is upheaval. I want to molt like something ancient and impatient. I want to peel off the familiar skin—cowardice, inertia, the soft compromises I’ve negotiated with mediocrity—and step out of it raw and newly assembled. Someone decisive. Someone difficult to bargain with. A man who doesn’t soften at the edges when it matters. A man who doesn’t flinch.

    But because that kind of transformation rarely arrives—no lightning bolt, no divine summons—we improvise. We cosplay. We assemble identities the way children assemble Halloween costumes: a prop here, a posture there, a new narrative stitched together from objects that flatter us. We don’t become new men; we accessorize the old one and call it progress.

    If you’re a watch collector, the illusion is particularly seductive. For twenty years, I lived inside a very specific mythology: polished steel, mechanical divers, the ritual of winding and setting, the quiet romance of gears and springs. I told myself I belonged to a certain tribe—men of discernment, men of patience, men who appreciated craft. It was a pleasing fiction.

    Then, in February of 2026, at sixty-four—an age when one is expected to consolidate, not detonate—I betrayed my own aesthetic. I bought the watch I had resisted for over a decade: the G-Shock Frogman. I had dismissed it for years as a resin aberration, a digital eyesore, a violation of everything I claimed to value. And yet, in a moment that felt less like a decision and more like possession, I ordered it from Sakura Watches in Japan.

    The acquisition was not elegant. It was a bureaucratic gauntlet. Emails. Texts. Tracking updates that read like dispatches from a stalled expedition. A sudden hostage situation in a Long Beach DHL facility until I paid a $100 ransom dressed up as an import fee. By the time the box arrived, I assumed the experience had poisoned the well. Surely the watch would arrive tainted by annoyance.

    It didn’t.

    I strapped it on, and something immediate and irrational occurred. Not admiration—bonding. A click deeper than preference. It triggered a memory I hadn’t summoned in years: the 1970s TV show Shazam!, where a boy named Billy Batson speaks a word—Shazam!—and a bolt of lightning splits the sky, transforming him into Captain Marvel. Child becomes hero. Hesitation becomes action.

    The Frogman was my word. Not spoken, but worn.

    And here is the part that resists tidy explanation: I did not feel like a man who had purchased a watch. I felt like a man who had crossed a threshold. As if some internal lever had been pulled without my consent. The old aesthetic, the old loyalties—they didn’t argue; they receded. Something else advanced.

    Call it delusion if you want. Call it consumer theater. But the experience had a force to it, a momentum that mocked the idea of careful, rational choice. It felt like being drafted by a version of myself I hadn’t authorized.

    I don’t know what comes next. I only know this: the change did not ask permission, and I did not resist it.

  • Sandwich Serendipity and the Futility of Bloodwork

    Sandwich Serendipity and the Futility of Bloodwork

    My doctor wants bloodwork—a full panel: PSA, lipids, liver function, hemoglobin—the entire bureaucratic inquisition, designed to convert my bloodstream into a tidy Excel file. I concede the PSA; no one wants to play roulette with prostate cancer. But the rest feels like an elaborate confirmation of what I already know. At 230 pounds—twenty over my fighting weight—my numbers will behave themselves, with the lone exception of LDL, which will arrive slightly smug and slightly elevated. Twenty extra pounds always leaves a trace, like fingerprints at a low-stakes crime scene. At 210, those same labs would glow with moral rectitude, the biochemical equivalent of a pressed shirt and a firm handshake.

    What I need is not diagnostics but discipline. The blood test will not reveal anything that a mirror and a waistband haven’t already disclosed. When the results come back, I’ll receive the ritual “plan of action,” translated from medical into plain English: lose twenty pounds. A reasonable directive. Also a promise I cannot make. I eat clean. I eat whole foods. I load up on protein. I’ve exiled alcohol. None of it matters. My appetite has the temperament of a teenager in shoulder pads, pacing the sidelines and waiting for the next snap.

    Spare me the reminder that I’m approaching sixty-five. My hunger did not get the memo. Last night, after dinner, after I had sworn a blood oath to stop eating at six, I began clearing out my daughter’s lunch bag and discovered it: an untouched turkey and cheese sandwich, wrapped in quiet indifference. There was no debate, no moral tribunal. I ate it immediately, reverently, savoring the soft, faintly sweet Trader Joe’s porridge bread as if it had been prepared for me by a benevolent deity with a sense of humor. It was, without exaggeration, the best moment of my day.

    You can dress this up as weakness, but that misses the phenomenon. This is Sandwich Serendipity—the electric, unearned joy of finding an uneaten sandwich where none should exist. It is not leftovers; it is treasure. It is the culinary equivalent of discovering cash in an old jacket or rubbing a lamp and having lunch appear. The afflicted man does not pause to assess freshness, provenance, or caloric impact. He does not negotiate with his better angels. He consumes. The sandwich is accepted as a gift from the universe, a brief amnesty from restraint, a shining interruption in an otherwise disciplined life.

    This is the man sitting across from the doctor, nodding politely at the mention of triglycerides and lifestyle modification. This is the man being asked to promise weight loss. And the honest answer—the only answer worth giving—is this: I will try. But somewhere, in some forgotten lunch bag, a sandwich is waiting. And when it calls, I will answer.

  • The Man Who Never Asked

    The Man Who Never Asked

    My wife has been sending me comedy skits about a subject that isn’t remotely funny: the epidemic of friendless adult men. The message arrives dressed as humor but lands as indictment—get off your ass and build a life that includes other human beings. Not for entertainment. For survival. For the family.

    The problem is I don’t know how.

    My friendships didn’t end with a bang; they evaporated. One by one, they thinned out, like hair in a drain, until nothing remained. I haven’t met a friend for a movie and a meal in nearly twenty-five years. Solitude didn’t ambush me; it settled in and redecorated. It became my default setting. Worse, it feels justified. I operate under a quiet but tyrannical assumption: no one would willingly spend that kind of time with me. Why would they? Friendship requires an investment, and I’ve already decided I’m not worth the return. Rejection is neatly avoided by never making the ask. A preemptive surrender disguised as dignity.

    When I think about how this calcified, I go back to 2005. My cousin and I met for dinner in downtown Los Angeles. Afterward, he wanted to extend the evening—drive twenty minutes to a coffee shop, linger, talk. I felt the anxiety rise like a fever. Dinner had been the contract; anything beyond it felt like trespass. I went along, reluctantly. He noticed. He never asked again. He moved on to a life crowded with friendships, a calendar he has to prune. I perfected the art of leaving early.

    I come by this honestly. My parents spent the last three decades of their lives without friends. My father borrowed social contact through his second wife but never rebuilt what he lost. My mother claimed friendships the way a customer claims familiarity with a waiter—pleasant, transactional, imaginary. Loneliness wasn’t diagnosed in our household; it was modeled. It looked normal. It felt inevitable.

    My parents weren’t bad people. They were self-involved, chemically compromised, and emotionally unavailable. My father once told me that if he could do it over again, he wouldn’t have children. People recoil when they hear that. I didn’t. It had the ring of truth I had already lived with. My mother, meanwhile, oscillated between warmth and collapse. Her depressions were so severe she disappeared into hospitals, and I disappeared into my grandparents’ house. Childhood became something to endure rather than inhabit.

    So I adapted. I became self-contained. I entertained myself. I eliminated the need for others before they could eliminate me. Being alone wasn’t a failure; it was a system.

    In my twenties, desire disrupted that system. I wanted relationships, so I built a version of myself that could get them. I became talkative, confident, funny—an actor with good timing and a decent script. It worked. Women believed in the character. So did I. But the performance had no depth. It couldn’t sustain love because it wasn’t built on vulnerability, only on impression. The relationships collapsed under the weight of my anxiety and selfishness. I could attract; I could not attach.

    That hasn’t entirely changed. I can still be charming in controlled environments. My colleagues enjoy me in passing. I can generate conversation the way a barista generates foam—pleasant, temporary, nonbinding. But conversation is not friendship. Friendship requires escalation, risk, the unthinkable act of asking someone to step outside the script and spend time with you. That’s where I freeze. I assume the answer will be no, and so I never pose the question. It’s a tidy system: I protect myself from rejection by guaranteeing isolation.

    This morning, sitting in my car waiting to take my daughters to school, I almost performed another ritual of avoidance. I reached for my watch, ready to photograph it for Instagram—a small offering to the gods of trivial validation. For a moment, I considered it. Then the idea repulsed me. The absurdity of it. As if a watch photo could compensate for a hollow social life. As if attention could substitute for connection. It felt like feeding a hunger with sugar and calling it nourishment.

    So I sat there instead, thinking about those videos my wife keeps sending me. They’re funny in the way a diagnosis can be funny—because it’s accurate. She’s worried. She should be.

    The truth is simple and unflattering: I’ve built a life that minimizes risk and, in doing so, minimizes connection. If I want to be less of a burden to my family, I have to become someone who can love beyond the walls of his own habits. That means doing the one thing I’ve spent decades avoiding.

    It means asking.

  • The Yahtzee Test of a Meaningful Life

    The Yahtzee Test of a Meaningful Life

    People like to ask, “Does your life have meaning?” as if the answer can be retrieved from a drawer and presented with confidence. Most of us reach for an answer polished and forgettable: family, work, the usual suspects. But these answers have the texture of wallpaper—present everywhere, saying nothing.

    You can refine the answer and still miss the mark. You might say, “Playing the piano gives me more meaning than bingeing on confectionary pleasures online.” True enough. There is a difference between sitting at a piano and sitting in a stupor. One engages discipline, attention, and a relationship with beauty; the other numbs you into a soft, glazed anonymity. But even this comparison mistakes elevation for meaning. Music may lift you above the gutter, but altitude alone is not purpose.

    The real question is not what you do, but who you are while doing it. Do you become the man who scrolls at expensive watch listings while his daughter waits with a box of Yahtzee and you dismiss her because you’re “too busy”? Or do you close the laptop and recognize, in that moment, that time with her is not an interruption but the point? Meaning reveals itself not in our hobbies but in our reflexes.

    This is where Viktor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, enters the conversation with uncomfortable authority. Writing out of the concentration camps, he did not theorize meaning from a leather chair. He embodied it under conditions designed to strip it away. His account carries weight because of his moral posture—his insistence that even in degradation, one could orient oneself toward service, toward others, toward something beyond the self. Meaning, for Frankl, was not a feeling or a hobby. It was an orientation.

    By contrast, selfishness corrodes everything it touches. A man may possess a thriving career and a loving family, but if he approaches both as instruments for his own gratification, he drains them of significance. Push that far enough and you arrive at nihilism—the quiet conviction that nothing matters, not because nothing exists, but because nothing is allowed to matter. Nihilism is not a philosophy so much as a habit of disregard.

    Stories, whether drawn from sacred texts or fairy tales, understand this intuitively. They pit the nihilistic malcontent against the purpose-driven hero. But they do not deliver meaning as a reward, neatly wrapped and handed over. Meaning is not an external prize; it is the byproduct of character—of attention, sacrifice, and the refusal to treat other people as disposable.

    The traditions diverge on how that character is formed. In Judaism, one cultivates it through action, with God’s help, through law and discipline. In Christianity, the diagnosis is harsher: we are too compromised by original sin to generate virtue on our own and must throw ourselves on divine mercy, hoping for transformation. Which account is closer to the truth remains an open question. What is not in doubt is this: meaning is not something you acquire. It is something you become.

  • The Quiet Art of Not Wasting Your Life

    The Quiet Art of Not Wasting Your Life

    If we care about the state of our souls, we have to ask a difficult question: How do we treat time as a sacred, limited gift—something to be used with urgency, yet protected by stillness? In other words, how do we move with purpose without surrendering to the chaos of perpetual hurry?

    My problem—one I can’t dodge—is how easily I waste time while convincing myself I’m doing something worthwhile. I wake up intending to write, but drift into “research”: consumer products I don’t need, fitness principles I already know, or whatever flickers across my screen and triggers FOMO. The drain is subtle but relentless. A morning that should belong to reading and writing dissolves into trivial pursuits. I justify it with a familiar lie: I am a nobody with nothing to say. What difference does it make if I squander a few hours? Why not entertain myself instead?

    These rationalizations amount to treating my life with reckless disregard. They expose something uglier beneath the surface—a low sense of self-worth and a quiet flirtation with nihilism, the belief that nothing really matters.

    Of course, talk is cheap. I can articulate all of this with precision and still change nothing. I tell myself my habits should align with my beliefs, echoing Arthur Brooks from The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness. But knowledge without discipline is decoration. When I waste time online, it doesn’t just distract me—it diminishes me. It acts like kryptonite. I become a lesser version of myself.

    I know the alternative. When I guard my attention, I compose longer, more ambitious piano pieces. When I don’t, I squeeze creativity into leftover scraps of time and produce reheated versions of my past work—safe, derivative, forgettable.

    It is astonishing how easily we waste time and then defend the waste, even when the defense collapses under minimal scrutiny. I remember falling into this pattern around the year 2000, when the internet first began its quiet takeover. Looking back, I think of Jim Harrison’s line: “It’s so easy to piss away your life on nonsense.” The accuracy is almost cruel.

    This realization struck me again this morning. I had “nothing” to write about, yet decided to open John Mark Comer’s The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry. Within two pages, the emptiness I claimed dissolved into a torrent of thoughts—about chaos, distraction, sacred versus profane time, and the psychology of hurry itself.

    Comer has reason to feel overwhelmed. As a pastor delivering six teachings every Sunday to accommodate a growing congregation, burnout is almost inevitable. My situation is the inverse. I am a college writing instructor with an abundance of free time, and with retirement a year away, that abundance is about to expand into something even larger—and potentially more dangerous.

    Comer imagines his future: a successful pastor, bestselling author, and sought-after speaker. By every external metric, he wins. But internally, he sees something else—hollowness, irritability, exhaustion, and a life that feels “emotionally unhealthy and spiritually shallow.” He barely recognizes himself.

    So he steps away. After a decade of acceleration, he takes a sabbatical. He sees a therapist. Stripped of his role as a megachurch pastor—the centerpiece of his identity—he feels disoriented, describing himself as “a drug addict coming off meth.” He has time now, but no clarity about who he is without the machinery of constant activity.

    He frames his book simply: imagine meeting him for coffee in Portland, talking about how not to drown in the “hypermodern” world. His approach is explicitly Christian, rooted in the life and teachings of Jesus, and aimed at answering a deceptively simple question: what does it mean to rest? And more importantly, how does one rest in a culture that equates value with speed?

    I approach this with skepticism. I’ve been a Christian-obsessed agnostic since I was seventeen, and I have little patience for spiritual platitudes. Still, Comer has earned his authority through suffering, not abstraction. He anticipates my resistance and addresses it directly: “If you want a quick fix or a three-step formula in an easy acronym, this book isn’t for you either. There’s no silver bullet for life. No life hack for the soul. Life is extraordinarily complex. Change is even more so. Anybody who says differently is selling you something.”

    That alone earns my attention.

    So I’ll take the invitation. I’ll sit down for coffee and listen to what he has to say in his so-called “anti-hurry manifesto.”

  • Frictionmaxxing in the Age of Ease

    Frictionmaxxing in the Age of Ease

    In “Our Longing for Inconvenience,” Hanif Abdurraqib diagnoses a modern sacrilege: we have streamlined the sacred. Love, once a slow collision of timing, nerve, and chance, has been repackaged as a swipe—faces flicked past like clearance items in a digital aisle. Courtship now resembles an online shopping spree, complete with filters, wish lists, and the quiet suspicion that you’re not choosing so much as being A/B tested. It raises an unflattering question: are we still falling in love, or have we become compliant participants in a well-designed experiment? Convenience has done what convenience always does—it removed the friction and took some of the humanity with it. What remains is efficient, scalable, and faintly hollow.

    The backlash has a name—call it frictionmaxxing. People, starved for something earned, are reintroducing resistance on purpose: analog rituals, delayed gratification, tasks that refuse to collapse into a tap. There’s nostalgia for the Before Convenience Times, when the self felt hammered into shape rather than 3D-printed from preference settings. The mythology is simple: meaning requires effort; effort requires inconvenience.

    I’m not moved by the usual props—turntables, VCRs, the museum of obsolete plastic. That feels like cosplay. But I do recognize the pull in two places of my own life that refuse to fake it: my acoustic Yamaha upright piano that answers only to touch and time, and my kettlebells that don’t care about my feelings or my notifications. Both demand presence. Both punish distraction. They’re small, stubborn antidotes to the screen’s narcotic ease.

    Abdurraqib’s warning is less about gadgets than about posture. Convenience doesn’t just lubricate life; it reclines it. We become passive, distractible, pleasantly numb—a polite version of Friedrich Nietzsche’s Last Man, optimized for comfort and allergic to striving. The tragedy isn’t that we have tools; it’s that the tools quietly train us to avoid anything that resists us.

    Here’s the confession that ruins the tidy narrative: I don’t need to blame screens for my preference for ease. I came that way. Given the choice between puttanesca and a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, I will choose the path that requires fewer verbs. I love puttanesca in theory—the garlic, the brine, the argument it makes on the tongue. I do not love it enough to perform the liturgy required to summon it. Convenience didn’t corrupt me; it recognized me.

    The same instinct flared when at forty-eight I became a father–twins, no less. The prospect of nights broken into fragments, of diapers and pacing and the long choreography of care, filled me with a very modern dread: the dread of interruption. I complained. My cousin Garrett, who has the inconvenient habit of being right, told me that the friction is the bond—that the lost sleep and the repetition are not bugs but features, the forge where attachment is made. I believed him. Belief, however, did not improve my mood at three in the morning.

    None of this is going away. Convenience will continue to refine itself into invisibility, and our hunger for something earned will continue to nag at us like a conscience we can’t quite uninstall. The only workable response is not purity but partition: carve out blocks of time that refuse assistance, that insist on effort, that return you to the body and the task. Live, briefly, off the grid of your own habits.

    The irony, of course, is waiting for us with a smile. Give it six months and there will be a frictionmaxxing app to schedule your inconvenience, optimize your resistance, and remind you to be authentic at 4:30 p.m. You’ll tap “confirm,” and somewhere a server will congratulate you for choosing friction the convenient way.