Tag: love

When a Strap Solved Everything—and Instagram Ruined It

I don’t work for Divecore straps. I don’t have an affiliate link. I don’t even remember how I found them. They just appeared one day, like a cult recruiter with good posture. All I know is this: once I tried them, something clicked. The fit was right. The comfort was immediate. The look was honest. So I did what any rational watch obsessive does when he thinks he’s reached enlightenment—I stripped every watch off its bracelet, slapped on black or orange FKM Divecore straps, and declared myself finished.

Done.
Happy.
At ease.

That phrase—at ease—matters. A seven-watch collection, unified by one strap philosophy, felt merciful. There was no mental juggling, no wrist gouging from metal end links, no micro-adjustment rituals to accommodate the daily swelling and shrinking of my aging, temperamental wrist. The system was clean. Elegant. Humane. For once, the hobby felt like a hobby instead of a low-grade engineering problem.

Then, in August of 2025, Instagram did what Instagram does best: it ruined my peace. Someone informed me—solemnly, heroically—that a study had been released about FKM straps and PFAS “forever chemicals.” The straps in the study were abused like props in a MythBusters episode—conditions so extreme they bore little resemblance to actual wrist life—but still. With plastic contamination already saturating the planet, did I really need to marinate my arteries in additional synthetic mystery?

So off came the FKM. On went the “safe” alternatives: urethane, silicone, vulcanized rubber. They were… fine. Adequate. Technically acceptable. Emotionally inert. I wore them the way you eat airline chicken—without complaint, but without love. And yes, I feel compelled to say it again: I still don’t work for Divecore.

Feeling vaguely bereaved, I did what many men do when they sense disorder: I tried to impose balance. I put stainless steel bracelets back on some heavy hitters. I even bought a gunmetal, monochromatic dive watch on a bracelet, as if symmetry itself could rescue me. I now had four watches on straps and four on bracelets. The collection looked fantastic. Museum-worthy. Spreadsheet-perfect.

And yet—I was less happy.

That’s when I recognized the familiar enemy: Cognitive Load Creep. The slow, insidious return of mental fatigue as the collection grows more complex. Straps versus bracelets. Balance logic. Adjustment rituals. The hobby quietly mutates into unpaid systems management. Every glance at the watch box now came with a background hum of decision-making. And whenever that hum gets loud enough, a voice appears.

You lost the plot.

And it’s right.

The plot was never variety.
The plot was never balance.
The plot was happiness.

Happiness, in the watch hobby, is hard to define—but it’s easy to identify its opposites: stress, obsession, second-guessing, wheel-spinning, FOMO anxiety, mental overload, and the constant sense that you’ve taken on more than you can metabolize. If your watches feel like a to-do list, something has gone wrong.

I’m trying to learn from this chapter. I know, intellectually, that less really is more. I know stress is poison. I also know I have a flair for melodrama. I can turn a strap swap into a Greek tragedy. I pine. I brood. I catastrophize like an adolescent waiting for a love note reply that never comes. It’s embarrassing. It’s funny. And I’m certain I’m not alone. Watch people are wired this way—OCD-prone, sentimentally overloaded, forever narrating their own inner turmoil.

So what’s next?

I don’t know. There’s no blueprint. No masterplan. No illuminated exit sign pointing toward Horological Sanity. The best I can do is remain watch-agnostic, laugh at my own compulsions, and tell the truth about whatever move I make next—if I make one at all.

The world, I assure you, is not holding its breath.

But a fellow watch obsessive might be.

February 2, 2026
Why You Can’t Pursue the Watch Hobby in Solitude

I should have known at thirteen that seventeen would be brutal. At thirteen, Janis Ian’s “At Seventeen” was already circulating through the house like a prophecy. I liked the song well enough, but my mother loved it. It was her time machine back to high school—loneliness, rejection, the ache of not measuring up. More than once I watched her eyes fill as the song drifted out of our Panasonic portable radio. That was her loneliness anthem. I needed my own. Mine was “Watching and Waiting” by the Moody Blues—a song for someone alone in the dark who senses there is something greater beyond himself and aches to make contact with it. Less teenage rejection, more metaphysical hunger.

By seventeen, starting college, I was profoundly lonely. According to Erik Erikson, this is the stage defined by intimacy versus isolation, and I was losing badly. I felt it in my bones as a socially maladroit bodybuilder shuffling through classes by day and working nights as a bouncer at a teen disco called Maverick’s in San Ramon. Picture it: me at the door, arms crossed, watching a parade of thrill-seekers gyrate, flirt, and dissolve into noise. The job didn’t cure my loneliness; it distilled it. I was close enough to touch the crowd and miles away from belonging to it.

One morning after a late shift, I dreamed I was living in the Stone Age. I was alone in a cave, wrapped in animal skins, stepping out into a gray, indifferent sky. I raised my arms toward the clouds, reaching for something—anything—that might answer me. In the background, “Watching and Waiting” played like a prayer I hadn’t yet learned how to pray. The dream was sad and beautiful, which felt like progress. As Kierkegaard noted, despair’s worst form is not knowing you’re in it. At least I knew. And as the Psalmist understood long before therapy existed, grace tends to follow sorrow once the sorrow has been fully felt.

People hate being alone. They’ll sit through ads on YouTube rather than listen ad-free on Spotify because YouTube lets them comment, scroll, argue, agree—experience the song with others. Solitude may be cleaner, but communion is warmer. Which brings me to watches. What is the watch hobby in isolation? Nothing. A watch on a deserted island is just a lump of steel keeping time for no one. The hobby exists only because a community animates it—supports it, debates it, sometimes overfeeds it. A watch on your wrist is a semiotic flare. It says something. Others read it. You read them back. That exchange is the point.

This is what I mean by Horological Communion: the quiet fellowship formed when watches are not hoarded as private trophies but offered as shared symbols. Meaning emerges only when the object is seen, recognized, and answered—at meetups, in forums, in comment sections, across a knowing glance from one wrist to another. Without that communion, the watch is mute. It ticks, faithfully, but it says nothing at all.

February 1, 2026
The Hot Take Is the Chronic Cough of Something Gone Wrong

We live in a Hot Take culture, and on balance, hot takes do more harm than good.

For a decade, I feasted on them. Back when it was still called Twitter, my days were seasoned with sharp one-liners, instant judgments, and rhetorical mic drops. It felt bracing at first—intellectual espresso shots delivered in 280 characters. But over time, the feed stopped feeling like conversation and started feeling like a room full of people shouting clever insults at a fire.

About a year ago, I deleted my account. By then, I barely recognized the people I once followed. Everything had gone shrill. Bombast replaced thought. Even the impressive hot takes—clever, ruthless, beautifully phrased—eventually blurred into something anesthetizing. A constant buzz that left me dull rather than informed.

I didn’t quit social media entirely. What I actually want is boring, old-fashioned breaking news. Tell me what happened. Tell me where. Tell me when. I don’t need a verdict within thirty seconds. So now I drift through places like Threads, mostly lurking. Many of the smart people I used to follow migrated there. Some still do what they’ve always done: post headlines and context. Others can’t resist the gravitational pull of commentary. News first, hot take immediately after. Their allies cheer them on inside familiar silos, and the machine rewards escalation.

To be fair, not everyone posting is chasing dopamine. Some journalists are doing real work. They have massive audiences and feel a genuine obligation to interpret chaos in real time. They live in a crucible of praise and abuse, applause and outrage. That kind of constant psychic weather can’t be healthy, but the motive is understandable—meaningful engagement. If this were a pre-digital era, they’d still be doing something similar, just with deadlines instead of feeds. Slower. Quieter. Possibly saner.

But then there’s another species entirely: the professional Hot Taker.

This person has mastered the form. Their posts are short, sharp, structurally elegant. A good hot take is witty, memorable, and instantly legible. It lands. It spreads. It racks up likes and reposts like a slot machine hitting cherries. Success is measurable, public, addictive.

And that’s the trap.

When identity and self-worth become tethered to engagement metrics, the self gets commodified. Everything becomes raw material for the next take. Nuance is a liability. Hesitation is death. The hot take demands boldness, outrage, and certainty—even when certainty is fraudulent.

At that point, the Hot Taker is no longer responding to the world; they are farming it.

I’ve watched thoughtful, decent people slide into this role. At first, their posts are useful. Then they overshare. Then they pick fights they don’t need to fight. Eventually, their online life becomes a series of skirmishes that feel exhausting even to sympathetic observers. They can’t stop—not because they’re evil, but because the machine has trained them well.

So yes, we live in the Age of the Hot Take, where people measure their purpose by their ability to generate applause from the faithful. Hot takes don’t convert anyone. They delight the choir and enrage the opposition. Polarization intensifies. Nothing moves.

Is it unfair to call this a disease? I don’t think so.

First, there’s the hijack. The belief that constant expression equals relevance, that relevance equals worth. It’s a delusion reinforced by numbers. Likes don’t satisfy; they sharpen hunger.

Then there are the consumers. By liking and reposting, they feel they’re participating in history, bending reality toward justice. In practice, they’re mostly helping tribes harden their borders. Everyone believes they’re weaponizing truth. No one notices the epistemic ground eroding beneath them.

When COVID hit, I assumed the crisis would force clarity. Instead, it deepened the divide. Now measles—a disease we already solved—is making a comeback. Science, once the shared floor, has become another battlefield. If pandemics and preventable deaths can’t bring us together, hot takes certainly won’t.

You can fire off the most righteous, viral condemnation imaginable. Measles will still spread.

So what should we do instead?

The answer isn’t attractive. Reality hasn’t hit hard enough yet. Historically, people abandon fantasy only when consequences become unavoidable. Until then, we chatter. We posture. We perform. Hot takes aren’t solutions. They’re symptoms—the chronic cough that tells you something deeper is wrong.

January 28, 2026
The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

There is no such thing as an ultimate watch collection. That fantasy survives only in Instagram grids and forum signatures. In real life, your taste sharpens, clarifies, narrows—and that clarity does bring you closer to something satisfying. But it never brings closure.

The problem is not the watches. The problem is us.

We are capricious animals. One day we crave restraint; the next day we want spectacle. Nostalgia ambushes us and sends us chasing a watch tied to some earlier version of ourselves—college years, first job, first illusion of competence. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. A watch can be a time machine or a dead end.

Then there’s money. Grail pieces often cost so much that they can’t be worn without anxiety. They live in safes, not on wrists. You admire them abstractly but never bond with them. On the other end, budget watches sometimes fail the respect test. You want to love them, but something feels compromised—finish, heft, presence. The relationship never quite takes.

So if there is a destination, it isn’t perfection. It’s the sweet spot.

The watch isn’t too small or too large. It isn’t priced so high that you fear it, or so low that you dismiss it. It isn’t dull, but it isn’t shouting either. You can look at it from different angles and keep finding reasons to linger. It holds your attention without demanding it.

Some people chase that feeling through complexity. Chronographs seduce with their subdials and mechanical busyness. I tried that path. Instead of enchantment, I got sensory overload. Too much information. Too much pleading. I found myself longing for the blunt honesty of a diver.

But even a diver has to earn its place.

It needs salient features. Bold, but not desperate. Visually striking, but instantly legible. Purposeful without cosplay. The Seiko MM300 SLA023 comes to mind. It’s a legend in the Seiko lineup because it commits fully to its identity. Over 44mm wide. About 15mm thick. It doesn’t apologize. If you can carry those dimensions, it rewards you with gravitas and coherence.

If you can’t, there are alternatives.

The Seiko Alpinist SBDC209 is a different kind of seduction. At 39.5mm, it’s compact, refined, endlessly stare-able. You can live with it all day without fatigue. On the right wrist, it’s perfect. On mine, it disappears. And when a watch disappears, the answer is simple: no.

That’s the truth most collectors avoid. The “ultimate” collection isn’t about consensus or rankings. It’s about proportion—between the watch and the wrist, between desire and restraint, between fantasy and daily life.

You don’t arrive at it once.
You circle it.
And if you’re lucky, you pause there for a while.

January 27, 2026
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.

January 23, 2026
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.

January 22, 2026
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.

January 21, 2026
Captain Cancel and the Rise of Domestic Hermit Drift

The other day my wife went to lunch with a longtime friend—call her A—and, as women do with admirable efficiency, they covered marriage in a single sitting. A complained that her husband had been drinking more, growing possessive, increasingly controlling. During the meal, he called her three times. By the third interruption, my wife said, the phone might as well have been sitting at the table demanding a chair. When she told me the story later, I said it reminded me of the Tears for Fears song “Woman in Chains.” She didn’t hesitate. “That’s her life exactly,” she said.

After a pause, the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, to me. “I told A you don’t drink,” my wife said. “You’re not jealous or possessive. But you won’t leave the house. You’re a shut-in.”
“Doesn’t he go to the gym?” A asked.
“Not for twenty years,” my wife replied. “He does yoga and kettlebells at home. He’s been trapped in the man cave ever since. And what scares me,” she added, “is that he’s happy.”

I’m not entirely sure I am happy. I just know my tolerance for annoyance is perilously low, and it drops another notch with each passing birthday. I also know that my friends from my formative college years now live scattered across the country, like artifacts from a previous civilization. We’ve grown apart without drama, which is to say, efficiently. Locally, I have two friends. Tom, a wrestling coach, is either teaching or in Santa Barbara with his girlfriend. I see him about once a year, usually when he drives me to Home Depot so I can transport oversized items back to my cave. My other friend, Pedro, is an engineer who is thirty years younger than I am. The generational differences are… pronounced. We have lunch about four times a year. Add it up and yes—half a dozen social encounters annually qualifies me as a shut-in. Which makes me, by default, an authority on a condition many men my age quietly acquire: Domestic Hermit Drift.

Domestic Hermit Drift is the gradual, mostly unintentional retreat of a married man from friendships and public life into the managed comfort of home, where routine, hobbies, and solitude replace the effort and risk of maintaining relationships. It isn’t fueled by hostility or misanthropy but by convenience, irritability, fatigue, and the slow atrophy of social muscles. As his world contracts, his wife’s often expands, creating an asymmetry in which she carries the invisible labor of social connection, public presence, and emotional buffering. The genius of the drift is its stealth. No announcement is made. No door slams. The man simply mistakes peace for fulfillment and stability for sufficiency.

As an expert in Hermit Drift, allow me to identify the warning signs.

First, your sleepwear, gym clothes, and home clothes become indistinguishable. You sleep in gym shorts and a workout shirt, wear them around the house, exercise in them, shower, and rotate in a freshly washed identical set. You call this efficiency. You experience genuine pleasure in this loungewear optimization and feel morally superior to the sheeple who change outfits multiple times a day. Minimalism, you insist, is a virtue.

Second, while your wife and her friends design custom T-shirts and handmade signs for rock concerts in the desert, you remain home on a Saturday night swapping straps on your diver watches. You build watch-rotation calendars. You track wrist time. You rank your collection by annual usage. The fact that you know you wore your Seiko Marine Master for exactly 863 hours last year strikes you as reasonable, even impressive. Others find it alarming.

Third, because your tolerance for irritation is low, you shop only at dawn, when grocery stores are nearly empty and the few people present are still half-asleep—docile, unthreatening, manageable. You take pride in shopping before the rat race wakes up. This dovetails nicely with your time-management philosophy: bed at nine, up at five. By the time the world stirs, you’ve had your coffee, your steel-cut oats, your kettlebell workout, and your canvas grocery bags—your weekly macros—put neatly away. You are, in your own mind, winning.

The rest of the day unfolds under a regime your wife has named Captain Cancel. Every proposed outing meets a veto. You can’t attend a concert because it might rain, despite cloudless skies. You can’t go to a restaurant because parking is inadequate, and when your wife reminds you of the new parking structure, you explain that it’s widely known to be contaminated with asbestos. A comedian you once loved is playing in Hermosa Beach, but you inform her he hasn’t been funny since the Reagan administration. A trip to Maui is ill-advised due to avian flu, especially dangerous during air travel. A beach picnic is canceled because of a sewage spill that, you explain, has compromised not just the water but the atmosphere. You agree to Taco Tuesday at the local brewery, but it’s too loud. You stuff toilet paper in your ears, announce you’re unwell, and Uber home. You are never invited again. This makes you smile as you drift into a deeply satisfying sleep.

If you recognize any of these traits, congratulations. You are anti-social. You are Captain Cancel. You have chosen your isolation, locked yourself in your cage, and—most importantly—convinced yourself it was the sensible thing to do.

January 19, 2026
Why I Must Become the Skinny Yoga Guy

As the clock keeps punching holes in the calendar and I drift into the middle distance of my sixties, I’m stalked by the uneasy sense that I am not the man I’m supposed to be. I carry thirty extra pounds like unpaid emotional invoices. I cave to food temptations with embarrassing regularity. I indulge in narcissistic spirals of self-pity. My body bears the archaeological record of a lifetime of weightlifting injuries. Something has to give. The question isn’t whether I’m a complex human being—of course I am—but which single image can give me dignity, courage, and self-possession as I face my obligations, stay engaged with this lunatic world, and fend off entropy. The image that keeps returning, uninvited but insistent, is this: I am the Skinny Yoga Guy.

The Skinny Yoga Guy eats vegan, clean, and whole, not as a performance but as a quiet discipline. He hits his protein macros with buckwheat, pumpkin seeds, peas, soy, garbanzos, and nutritional yeast, without sulking or negotiating. He cooks plant-based meals anchored in Thai, Mexican, and Indian traditions, not sad beige bowls marketed as “fuel.” He doesn’t snack like a raccoon in a pantry; he sips cucumber water and green tea and moves on with his day.

He practices yoga six days a week, a full hour each time, sweating without complaint. The body lengthens. The spine straightens. He appears taller, calmer, less compressed by life. There’s a faint health glow—less “Instagram guru,” more “someone whose joints don’t hate him.” The discipline reshapes his temperament. The short fuse and indulgent sulks fade. In their place emerges a man who notices other people, attends to their needs without sermonizing, and discovers—almost accidentally—that service makes him sturdier, not smaller.

In this revised operating system, the watch obsession quietly dies. No more chunky diver watches as heroic cosplay. No rotation. No drama. Just one watch: the G-Shock GW-5000. The purest G-Shock because it refuses theater. Shockproof, accurate, solar-powered, atomically synced. No Bluetooth, no notifications, no begging for attention. It does one thing relentlessly well: it tells the truth about time. It is reliability without narcissism.

If the GW-5000 is indestructibility stripped of spectacle, then my assignment is clear: I must become its carbon-based counterpart. Less bloat. Fewer features. More uptime. Yoga becomes joint maintenance. Vegan food becomes corrosion control. No supplements that blink. No gadgets that chirp. No dietary Bluetooth pairing with guilt. Just a lean system designed to absorb impact, recover quickly, and remain accurate. GW-5000 firmware, now awkwardly attempting to run on two legs.

The longing is real. I want to be the Skinny Yoga Guy—disciplined, light, healthy—wearing a single $300 G-Shock as a quiet marker of having stepped off the status treadmill. I no longer want validation from a $7,000 luxury watch. Wanting this man is easy. Becoming him is not. That requires character, not aspiration.

My hunch is that I need to write my way into him. A novel titled The Skinny Yoga Guy. Not a parody, not a self-help tract, but a chronicle of real-time change rendered with mordant humor and unsparing honesty. The book isn’t the point. Transformation is. The novel would simply be the witness.

So here I am, a larval creature trapped in my cocoon. I must emerge as a new creature. The challenge is issued. Whether the world is waiting for my metamorphosis is irrelevant. I am. And that, for once, feels like enough.

January 18, 2026
Learning About Rejection on a Flight to Miami

In the summer of 1972, when I was ten years old and convinced my destiny was to become a musclebound baseball god in the image of Reggie Jackson, I found myself on a flight from LAX to Miami, pressed against the window and staring out at adulthood like it was another continent. In the middle seat sat a blonde bombshell in her mid-twenties wearing pink hot pants with psychedelic purple-and-white stripes and legs so aggressively tanned they could have powered a citrus-processing plant. She wasn’t just attractive; she was a mood. She radiated the entire seventies—optimism, excess, invitation. I wasn’t merely drawn to her. I was drawn to the future she seemed to promise.

On the aisle sat her conversational counterpart: a pencil-necked, dark-haired man of similar age with impeccable manners, minimal charisma, and the quiet dignity of a man who alphabetizes his spice rack. He was an accountant. She was in dental hygiene school. For five uninterrupted hours, the two of them performed their biographies live, with me as the captive audience. Mostly she spoke. He nodded, gasped on cue, and occasionally supplied a sentence fragment to prove he was still alive. She talked about school, snacks, weather, philosophy—everything. It felt like watching a reality show pilot that forgot to end. But I didn’t mind. She was animated. She was confident. She was hope in hot pants.

At one point she announced that her ears needed to pop and offered both of us Dentyne gum, explaining that it helped with altitude. I briefly wondered if she thought we were participating in some sort of triathlon of inner-ear resilience. The accountant accepted the gum solemnly, like a man taking medical advice from destiny.

When the plane finally shuddered to a stop at the gate, the accountant—buoyed by five hours of uninterrupted conversation and the survival glow of having endured it—asked her out on a date. She declined with practiced kindness, the sort of smile perfected by women who have said no thousands of times without ever raising their voice. He accepted the rejection gracefully, even apologetically, as if her disinterest were an inconvenience he had caused.

My ten-year-old brain short-circuited. I felt like I’d witnessed something indecent. Rejection, I believed, was supposed to be private. Public rejection multiplied the shame. I flashed back to junior high dances where I’d cross the cafeteria, ask a popular girl to dance, watch her recoil as if I’d mistaken bravery for stupidity, then retreat to my friends’ laughter. Now I was seeing the adult version. How could this accountant—handsome, polite, numerically gifted—be rejected after such an extended airborne courtship? I sat there, my romantic assumptions collapsing like cheap sci-fi scenery. Maybe he was too bland. Maybe she had a chaotic love life waiting in Miami. Or maybe—this was the real lesson—she’d simply enjoyed a conversation to pass the time on a long flight. Whatever the reason, I absorbed his rejection as if it were my own. I remain convinced that somewhere in the universe’s permanent records, my name appears next to a small but enduring note: rejected by attractive woman. And yes, it still stings.

January 17, 2026