Cinemorphosis

Tag: love

  • Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    In the documentary Queen of Chess, Judit Polgár recounts how she became a grandmaster at the age of fifteen, shattering one of the oldest gender barriers in competitive chess. She entered a world where many male players regarded women not merely as underdogs but as biological impossibilities. Looking back on her extraordinary rise, she credits her parents with many gifts, but one towers above the rest: they taught her always to believe in herself.

    I have heard those words my entire life. Believe in yourself. They are stitched onto graduation speeches, embroidered across motivational posters, and recited by well-meaning adults with the mechanical confidence of people reading assembly instructions. The phrase has always struck me as strangely hollow, a verbal vitamin whose label promises transformation while omitting the active ingredient. Yet when Judit Polgár uttered those same words, they landed differently. Here was someone who had walked into hostile rooms, defeated the world’s strongest players, and emerged victorious. Her confidence had survived contact with reality. That gave the cliché a gravity it had never possessed before.

    Over the months since watching the documentary, I have tried to understand what believing in yourself actually means. It is not wishful thinking, nor is it chanting affirmations in the bathroom mirror before work. It is trust. It is the confidence that your conscious intentions and your unconscious habits are allies rather than enemies. It is the quiet expectation that when difficulty arrives, you will respond with discipline instead of sabotage. Believing in yourself also means possessing the assurance that you belong in rooms where others doubt your right to enter. It is the conviction that closed doors are obstacles to overcome rather than verdicts to accept.

    The difficulty, at least in my case, is that I have accumulated decades of evidence against myself. My adversary has never been an unsympathetic chess establishment. It has been the unruly republic inside my own skull. I resolve to become more patient, then lose my temper over some trivial irritation before lunchtime. I promise to eat sensibly, only to find myself negotiating peace treaties with pizza and signing unconditional surrender documents to apple pie crowned with vanilla ice cream. I announce noble intentions with presidential confidence, while my appetites quietly stage a coup before dinner. After enough of these episodes, self-doubt ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a statistical conclusion.

    Then there is vanity, perhaps the most elegant form of self-deception ever invented. Blaise Pascal observed that we expend more effort creating the appearance of virtue than acquiring virtue itself. I have often found that observation painfully accurate. It is easier to curate the image of a disciplined life than to endure the discipline required to build one. Vanity offers applause without achievement, while laziness quietly pockets the bill. Together they form a conspiracy against genuine confidence. You cannot consistently admire a person who repeatedly breaks promises to himself, even when that person happens to be you.

    Of course, recognizing these flaws carries its own danger. Honest self-examination can quickly mutate into sophisticated excuse-making. One can become so fascinated by one’s defects that they begin functioning as permanent alibis. “This is simply who I am,” the inner defense attorney argues, as though diagnosis absolves responsibility. It does not. Accurate self-knowledge should produce accountability, not acquittal.

    That is why I admire Judit Polgár. Her confidence does not appear theatrical or narcissistic. It rests upon competence, discipline, and years of keeping promises to herself. I suspect her parents did more than encourage her to believe in herself. They taught her to become the sort of person who deserved her own trust.

    For those of us who did not inherit that gift so naturally, there is another path. We cannot manufacture self-belief through slogans. We must earn it the old-fashioned way, by repeatedly choosing character over compulsion, humility over vanity, discipline over appetite, and substance over performance. Confidence is not bestowed by motivational speeches. It is accumulated, one kept promise at a time.

  • The Museum of Youth

    The Museum of Youth

    The Getty Museum has a way of conspiring with beautiful weather to make mortality feel especially impolite. Today, the sky possessed the crystalline blue one imagines hovering over ancient Pompeii before Vesuvius interrupted everyone’s plans. The museum’s travertine terraces glowed in the California sun, and everywhere I looked were couples in their twenties, impossibly attractive and strolling with the unselfconscious confidence that only youth can afford. Watching them, I found myself seized by an irrational envy. They seemed to possess not merely smooth skin and stronger knees but entire decades still waiting to unfold before them. Their lives resembled gleaming new luxury cars rolling effortlessly off the showroom floor. Mine, by comparison, felt like an old jalopy whose owner had begun listening nervously for unfamiliar noises under the hood.

    I envied what they represented more than who they were. They still possessed unopened chapters, careers not yet exhausted, friendships not yet mourned, dreams still wrapped in factory packaging. Youth carries with it the intoxicating illusion that time is an inexhaustible natural resource rather than a rapidly depreciating asset. Standing among them, I felt like someone who had arrived late to a party only to discover that everyone else was just beginning. I attempted the usual remedies. I reminded myself how fortunate I have been, how much joy my life has contained, how many blessings I scarcely deserved. None of it helped. Self-awareness is an ineffective antidepressant. Instead, I found myself scolding my own melancholy, accusing myself of being simultaneously ungrateful, petty, and embarrassingly sentimental—as though shame were somehow an antidote to longing.

    Fortunately, despair has an enemy that rarely receives the credit it deserves: usefulness. Later that afternoon, my teenage daughter and I sat in the museum café eating burgers while the conversation drifted toward her latest fascination—the pop music of the 1970s. Suddenly I was no longer competing with twenty-five-year-olds for possession of the future. I was explaining why certain songs endure, introducing artists she had not yet discovered, and watching her curiosity gather momentum. In that ordinary exchange, something quietly shifted. My value no longer depended upon having decades ahead of me. It depended upon having decades behind me that were worth sharing.

    That afternoon reminded me that envy is often a failure of perspective. I had mistaken youth for significance when significance had been sitting across the table all along. The young couples wandering the Getty possessed one kind of wealth: possibility. I possessed another: memory, experience, hard-earned judgment, and a daughter who still found those things worth hearing. The museum’s masterpieces had survived centuries because they continued to speak across generations. Perhaps that is the better aspiration. We eventually stop being the newest exhibit in the gallery. Our task then is to become one of the paintings that still rewards anyone willing to stop, look closely, and listen.

  • The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    The Watch Channel at a Crossroads

    My video production is on hold because I find myself interrogating my place in the watch world. I have little appetite for another “State of the Collection” video. That genre has become the YouTube equivalent of a sitcom reunion special: everyone knows the script before the opening credits roll. Likewise, I am convinced I have exhausted the lexicon of watch addiction. I have dissected acquisition syndrome, rationalization, buyer’s remorse, dopamine hits, grail watches, collection pruning, and every psychological contortion a watch enthusiast performs while pretending another purchase is somehow “different this time.” At some point, the commentary begins recycling itself, and I have no desire to become an echo of my former self.

    The irony is that none of this means I love watches any less. They remain as captivating—and as capable of hijacking my imagination—as they were twenty years ago. Two pieces continue to haunt me. The first is the Grand Seiko SBGP009, whose champagne-silver dial possesses the quiet authority of vintage elegance while its quartz movement drifts no more than ten seconds in an entire year. The second is the Orient Star M42 Diver 1964 Recreation (RE-AU0503N), a watch that somehow manages to look both nostalgic and purposeful without descending into retro cosplay. My greatest misfortune is that neither watch is outrageously expensive. The Grand Seiko costs only about three thousand dollars, and the Orient Star about one thousand. I almost wish they were twice as expensive. Overpriced luxury has an odd virtue: it occasionally protects us from ourselves.

    Meanwhile, most of my creative energy has migrated to my blog. There I can pursue ideas that would suffocate inside a fifteen-minute YouTube video. I can move from watches to literature, from moral philosophy to true crime, from AI to theology without asking whether the algorithm will punish me for changing lanes. The writing feels richer, stranger, and ultimately more meaningful. Unfortunately, blogs occupy the cultural equivalent of a deserted side street while YouTube resembles Times Square. One offers freedom without an audience; the other offers an audience that constantly demands the familiar. Whether I can remain content scribbling thoughtful essays into relative obscurity is a question I have not yet answered.

    One conclusion, however, no longer requires interrogation. I am an incurable watch enthusiast. There is no treatment, no twelve-step program, no miraculous cure. I have accepted that reality. My task is not to extinguish the fascination but to discipline it. I must keep reminding myself that admiring a watch is not the same thing as needing to own it. Beauty can be appreciated without becoming another possession. In fact, the older I become, the more I suspect that an overcrowded collection diminishes rather than enriches the experience, spreading affection so thinly that no single watch receives the attention it deserves. Perhaps the highest form of collecting is learning that appreciation sometimes reaches its fullest expression the moment you decide to walk away.

    Happy Fourth, everyone.

  • Every Watch Collector Dreams of Losing His Collection

    Every Watch Collector Dreams of Losing His Collection

    I’ve been obsessing over watches for more than twenty years. During that time I’ve come to know hundreds of fellow obsessives, and I’ve learned that we all suffer from the same peculiar affliction.

    Many of us eventually assemble collections that should, by any reasonable standard, satisfy us. Mine certainly should. I own watches I genuinely love and wear regularly. The hunt is largely over.

    Or so it would seem.

    Because every serious collector eventually asks the same deliciously irrational question.

    What if I had to start over?

    Suppose I came home from work and discovered that an earthquake, a burglary, or perhaps the Rapture had removed every watch from my collection. My watch box sat open like an abandoned nest.

    Tabula rasa.

    Nothing remained.

    What would I buy first?

    Among watch enthusiasts, this thought experiment produces an excitement that borders on religious ecstasy. It is Dorothy taking her first step onto the Yellow Brick Road. The adventure begins anew.

    The appeal isn’t difficult to explain.

    You would have the opportunity to lose your mind all over again.

    You could experience, for a second time, the exquisite madness of becoming a watch collector.

    When you were young in the hobby, you complained endlessly about the obsession. The endless research. The sleepless nights. The compulsive buying and selling. The dopamine dripping from every incoming package and every outgoing shipment.

    You called it addiction.

    You called it insanity.

    You swore that one day you would finally reach contentment.

    Then contentment arrived.

    And quietly, almost shamefully, you began missing the insanity.

    The seasoned collector sometimes resembles Neddy Merrill in John Cheever’s “The Swimmer.” Like Neddy, he imagines himself younger than he really is, setting out once more on an impossible journey, convinced that somewhere ahead waits the exhilaration of youth. Not because youth was wiser—it certainly wasn’t—but because everything still shimmered with possibility.

    That is what the empty watch box promises.

    Possibility.

    So what would I do if fate forced me to begin again?

    I’d like to think experience has made me wiser.

    I’d probably abandon mechanical watches altogether. I’d pursue precision instead of romance.

    Every watch would be solar-powered.

    Every watch would synchronize itself through atomic radio signals or GPS satellites.

    No winding.

    No battery changes.

    No time drift.

    Just effortless perfection beneath the endless Southern California sun.

    The collection might include several digital G-Shocks, unquestionably a Frogman, a couple of Citizen Promasters, one or two Citizen Attesas, and perhaps a pair of Seiko Astrons.

    On paper, it sounds almost ideal.

    Until I imagine living with it.

    Then the doubts begin.

    I’d miss my Seiko mechanical divers.

    I’d miss my quartz Tuna.

    I’d miss the gentle sweep of a mechanical seconds hand doing absolutely nothing more accurately than a quartz movement while somehow feeling infinitely more alive.

    Before long, I’d find myself rebuilding almost exactly the collection I own today.

    That’s when the embarrassing truth becomes impossible to ignore.

    The exercise was never about watches.

    It was about the rabbit hole.

    Collectors often imagine they’re addicted to acquiring things.

    I don’t think that’s quite right.

    We’re addicted to anticipation.

    To research.

    To comparison charts.

    To late-night YouTube reviews.

    To convincing ourselves that the next purchase will finally resolve the argument raging inside our heads.

    The object merely gives the obsession somewhere to land.

    Take away the watches, and we’d simply begin manufacturing another fantasy.

    The empty watch box isn’t appealing because it contains nothing.

    It’s appealing because it gives us permission to become beautifully irrational one more time.

    That is the secret longing of the seasoned collector.

    Not another watch.

    Another chance to go gloriously, ecstatically, and completely mad.

  • The Watches Were Never the Addiction–It Was the Rabbit Holes

    The Watches Were Never the Addiction–It Was the Rabbit Holes

    Over the past twenty years, I’ve learned that I love watches a little too much.

    Not because I own too many.

    Because I expected too much from them.

    I made two mistakes. First, I convinced myself that the next watch would somehow complete me, that a particular dial, bezel, or movement would usher me into a higher state of existence. Second, I became addicted to flipping watches—not because I disliked them, but because every purchase, every sale, every unboxing delivered another hit of dopamine and another round of approval from fellow enthusiasts online.

    The watches became secondary.

    The chase became the hobby.

    Fortunately, my collection has settled into something resembling adulthood. I own five Seiko divers and five G-Shocks. After falling under the spell of G-Shock’s atomic precision—watches so obsessively punctual they correct themselves while I sleep—I have found myself drifting back toward my mechanical Seikos with fresh appreciation. As I write this, I’m wearing my Seiko SBDC203 Coastline Diver on a Divecore Waffle strap, watching its blue wave dial catch the light with quiet confidence.

    Oddly enough, I have nothing on my wish list.

    That statement would have sounded impossible a few years ago.

    I still admire watches. I linger over Citizen Attesas, Seiko Astrons, and Grand Seikos. My favorite watch ever made remains the Seiko SLA017, but I suspect our relationship will remain safely one-sided. I’ll admire it from afar on YouTube, where it can continue living its best life without emptying my wallet.

    That realization has spilled into other corners of my life.

    Once you discover that a watch cannot make you whole, you begin looking suspiciously at everything else trying to make the same promise.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Honda.

    A forty-thousand-dollar Toyota.

    A four-thousand-dollar luxury mattress.

    Consumer culture speaks with remarkable consistency.

    “Buy me,” it whispers. “Your new life begins here.”

    No, it doesn’t.

    At best, your new life begins with a slightly nicer object.

    The harder truth is that the improvements I actually want cannot be purchased.

    I want to become healthier.

    I want to lose twenty pounds.

    I want more discipline.

    I want to be fully present for my wife and daughters.

    I want to become the kind of man whose character quietly exceeds his possessions.

    No watch accomplishes that.

    No car does.

    No mattress does.

    The real danger isn’t believing that buying something will make me happy.

    That illusion is almost too obvious.

    The greater danger is subtler.

    It’s the research.

    I can disappear for hours into consumer rabbit holes with the enthusiasm of an archaeologist uncovering a lost civilization. I compare specifications, memorize model numbers, watch endless YouTube reviews, read forum debates, and convince myself that this painstaking investigation is somehow productive.

    It isn’t.

    It’s beautifully disguised procrastination.

    The internet has become a casino where information replaces slot machines. Every click offers the possibility that the next review, the next comparison, the next expert opinion will reveal the perfect purchase. Hours disappear without resistance.

    The acquisition isn’t the addiction.

    The pursuit is.

    That’s the part that frightens me.

    I have an obsessive personality. Obsession can be useful when it is harnessed toward writing, teaching, or improving my health. Left unattended, however, it happily attaches itself to titanium watch cases, mattress coil counts, automobile trim packages, fountain pens, headphones, or whatever shiny object wanders into view.

    Obsession doesn’t particularly care about the subject.

    It simply wants something to consume.

    Going forward, I want to become more suspicious of that impulse.

    Not because curiosity is bad.

    Curiosity is wonderful.

    But there is a profound difference between curiosity that enlarges your life and curiosity that distracts you from it.

    I want to spend fewer afternoons researching products and more afternoons becoming the kind of man who no longer needs them to feel complete.

    The irony is almost embarrassing.

    For years I believed I was searching for the perfect watch.

    What I was really searching for was the discipline to stop searching.

    ***

    For my fellow watch addicts, here is the link to my book The Man Who Lost His Mind to Watches:

  • The Unexpected Mercy of a Good Deed

    The Unexpected Mercy of a Good Deed

    It was late June of 2026. My wife and twin teenage daughters departed for a ten-day trip to London and Paris. I was invited and declined.

    Five hours on an airplane to Hawaii or Miami is my upper limit. Beyond that, my claustrophobia begins negotiating surrender terms. Ten days sprinting across Europe sounded less like a vacation and more like a competitive endurance event with no trophy at the finish line.

    You could say I have become jaded.

    In my younger years, I traveled widely—Russia, Ukraine, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Spain, Italy, France, England, Mexico. Travel opened my wife to the world. It had the opposite effect on me. My brain absorbed so much stimulation that it eventually shut down. While other people became energized by novelty, I became overwhelmed, withdrawn, and vaguely catatonic. Age has not improved the condition.

    My family understands this about me.

    No one was offended when I declined Europe.

    A few weeks after their return, we would all vacation together in Coronado. That was my kind of travel: buffets, poolside canopies, leisurely walks, and visits to Rolex and Breitling boutiques—not to buy anything, but to observe wealthy men purchasing luxury watches with the same casual indifference that others display when buying mangoes and guavas at a roadside market.

    My ideal vacation involves no driving, no itineraries, no guided tours, and no obligation to learn anything. Give me an infinity pool overlooking the ocean and enough free time to fantasize that I am immortal.

    I spend so much time inside my imagination that eventually I need a vacation from it.

    With my family gone, however, I knew the danger.

    Left alone, I would disappear into my own head.

    Chaos awaited there.

    To protect myself, I established a routine.

    Morning coffee.

    Writing.

    Piano.

    More coffee.

    A kettlebell workout in the garage accompanied by podcasts.

    A protein salad.

    A nap with more podcasts.

    A yogurt snack.

    More piano.

    A crime documentary.

    Dinner.

    More piano.

    Another crime documentary.

    Then bed, where podcasts continued whispering through my earbuds until morning.

    The first two days were unpleasant.

    I felt guilty, restless, mildly depressed, and perhaps a little insane.

    On day three, my wife and daughters video-called from London to report that their hotel room was tiny. The establishment was called the Zedwell Capsule Hotel. Calling it a hotel seemed generous. It was essentially a collection of sleeping pods.

    Nothing says “Welcome to Europe” quite like spending your first night in a glorified dresser drawer.

    One of my daughters was so distressed by the arrangement that she cried.

    After the call, I looked up the pods on YouTube.

    I recoiled in horror.

    For the first time all week, I felt grateful I had stayed home.

    By day four, I had settled into my routine. My family had moved on to more spacious accommodations in Paris. I missed them, but their daily calls and texts reassured me that they had not forgotten my existence.

    Meanwhile, I had time to think.

    During one kettlebell workout, I listened to Coleman Hughes and Caitlin Flanagan discuss why so many members of Gen Z and Gen Alpha were deciding not to have children.

    Economic concerns played a role, but the larger issue appeared to be radical individualism—the belief that spouses, children, and obligations interfere with freedom, mobility, and self-actualization.

    The discussion reminded me of sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and his concept of “liquid modernity.”

    Bauman argued that modern culture encourages people to remain perpetually fluid: endlessly reinventing themselves, constantly changing identities, refusing permanence, commitments, or fixed obligations. Personal truth becomes the highest authority, even when it is constructed from ignorance, immaturity, or wishful thinking.

    Children become burdens.

    Marriage becomes negotiable.

    Commitment becomes optional.

    Self-fulfillment becomes sacred.

    Part of me enjoyed my temporary freedom from family responsibilities.

    But I had no illusions about where my meaning came from.

    It came from responsibility.

    It came from being needed.

    The fantasy that life improves when every obligation disappears struck me as a cultural scam—a glossy marketing campaign disguising selfishness as enlightenment.

    Spend enough time on YouTube and TikTok and the pattern becomes obvious. The algorithms worship youth, beauty, novelty, and self-display.

    What passes for radical individualism often looks suspiciously like perpetual adolescence with better lighting and stronger filters.

    Then, on day five, something remarkable happened.

    My mortgage company sent me an email.

    The message informed me that my house was essentially paid off.

    If I wired approximately $3,700, the loan would be satisfied.

    I stared at the screen.

    My fifteen-year mortgage had become a thirteen-year mortgage because I had consistently paid an extra three hundred dollars toward principal every month.

    I had not realized how close I was.

    According to the online loan schedule, the mortgage still appeared to have years remaining. Apparently the system never fully accounted for the extra payments.

    In practical terms, I had just discovered that I no longer owed roughly sixty thousand dollars I had assumed was still hanging over my head.

    I called my wife in Paris.

    “The house is paid off,” I told her.

    I could hear the relief in her voice.

    She shared the news with our daughters, who would soon be driving. We were already anticipating the possibility of a third vehicle and insurance premiums that might require federal disaster assistance.

    The timing could not have been better.

    Providing security for my family made me happier than any luxury purchase ever could.

    I was grateful I had not squandered money chasing vanity.

    No pec implants.

    No liposuction.

    No Porsche.

    Restraint had quietly accomplished what indulgence never could.

    Restraint, I realized, is a superpower.

    On day seven, another responsibility arrived.

    A UCLA student named Hannah—a longtime family friend—had seven enormous duffel bags stored in our office. She was flying from Portland to Los Angeles and needed transportation to her dorm.

    I agreed immediately.

    Internally, I panicked.

    Driving to LAX stresses me out.

    Driving around UCLA stresses me out.

    Driving anywhere that involves students, luggage, and uncertain parking stresses me out.

    Hannah suggested taking an Uber to a Starbucks near the 405 to make things easier.

    I refused.

    Not because I was noble.

    Because I knew her.

    I had known her all her life.

    She was bright, disciplined, scholarly, and unusually composed for nineteen. Her parents were dear friends of ours. My wife loved her mother like a sister. Her father possessed the rare combination of business success and genuine kindness.

    I texted:

    “It would be my pleasure to pick you up at LAX.”

    This was technically a lie.

    I dreaded every minute of it.

    I checked Google Maps repeatedly.

    I monitored her flight obsessively.

    I left Torrance shortly after six.

    Forty-five minutes later, after navigating detours and traffic, I spotted Hannah outside the Alaska Airlines terminal.

    She climbed into the car.

    We talked.

    About UCLA.

    About Europe.

    About my paid-off house.

    About our upcoming Coronado vacation.

    By the time we reached Westwood, I had relaxed.

    The weather was glorious.

    At 7:15 p.m., sunlight still illuminated the streets. Students wandered casually through campus wearing shorts and T-shirts.

    The scene reminded me of Italy in the summer of 1973.

    I suddenly remembered a gelato vendor who spent his afternoons whistling Paul McCartney’s “My Love.”

    Not for customers.

    Not for tips.

    For himself.

    The memory remained vivid because the man seemed genuinely in love with life.

    At Hannah’s dorm, we made three elevator trips carrying duffel bags to the tenth floor.

    I was wearing a Nirvana T-shirt.

    A tall, skinny student walked past wearing the exact same shirt.

    He looked at me and smiled.

    “Nice shirt.”

    The room itself was small and claustrophobic.

    I immediately thought of my family sleeping inside London pods.

    Hannah thanked me.

    I wished her well.

    Then I drove back to Torrance.

    When I pulled into my driveway and the garage door rose, I felt unexpectedly satisfied.

    I texted Hannah’s father.

    Mission accomplished.

    Then I sat alone in my car and asked myself a question.

    “When was the last time you did something nice for someone? When was the last time you got off your butt and helped a friend?”

    The answer embarrassed me.

    I realized the favor had benefited me as much as Hannah.

    I struggle with religious faith.

    Yet the thought that entered my mind was unmistakable.

    God had shown me mercy.

    God had gotten me out of my own head long enough to do something useful.

    Inside the house, I was starving.

    But I had already eaten my meals for the day.

    I didn’t need more calories.

    I drank a glass of sparkling water instead.

    The hunger subsided.

    I watched a single crime documentary and prepared for bed.

    Just before turning off the light, I repeated the lesson that had quietly woven itself through the entire week:

    Restraint is a superpower.

  • The Promised Planet

    The Promised Planet

    One afternoon, drifting into a post-workout nap after a particularly glorious kettlebell session, I heard a famous writer tell a popular podcaster that nobody reads books anymore.

    Nobody.

    Not even him.

    He explained that social media had colonized his attention span. Years of feeding his narcissism to the digital machine had apparently consumed whatever brain cells were once responsible for sustained reading. There was something startling about hearing this confession from a public intellectual. It was like hearing a Michelin-starred chef announce that he now survives entirely on vending-machine burritos.

    The timing could not have been worse.

    I had recently completed writing a collection of fifteen stories. I had spent years dragging them through countless revisions, rescuing them from weaker incarnations, sanding rough edges, amputating dead passages, and rebuilding them sentence by sentence until they finally resembled what they were supposed to become. I was absurdly proud of them. I glowed with satisfaction. My pecs still felt inflated from kettlebell presses, and my literary vanity was enjoying a similar state of expansion.

    Then reality barged into the room.

    Nobody reads anymore.

    A bestselling author now sells perhaps ten thousand copies and celebrates as though he has conquered Gaul. An obscure author such as myself sells precisely zero. The arithmetic was not encouraging. My glow dimmed. My pumped-up ego suffered a rapid deflation.

    That evening I climbed into bed feeling mildly bereaved. I instructed my smart speaker to play classical music. It responded by offering business reports. I asked again. It played ZZ Top. I asked a third time. More ZZ Top. By the tenth attempt, after what felt like a hostage negotiation, it finally surrendered and delivered Johann Sebastian Bach.

    As the music drifted through the room, I picked up several books.

    I didn’t care about any of them.

    I tried another.

    Nothing.

    I opened my Amazon wishlist and scrolled through hundreds of titles accumulated over years of optimism. History. Biography. Philosophy. Literature. Politics. Books I had once believed would transform my life.

    I wanted none of them.

    It wasn’t exactly boredom. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was something murkier—a kind of spiritual flatness. An intellectual anemia.

    Part of my mood may have stemmed from guilt. My wife and twin daughters were exploring London and Paris. I had stayed behind. The long flights felt intolerable, and if I was honest, my curiosity about Europe had faded. I had wandered its streets decades earlier. Returning now felt like rereading a novel whose plot I already knew. The enchantment was gone.

    I comforted myself with thoughts of an upcoming family trip to Miami. A five-hour flight I could survive. Noise-canceling headphones would seal me off from humanity, and I could retreat into the biography of some legendary athlete. Sports biographies had become my literary comfort food. They soothed me while jet engines roared and the earth drifted by thirty thousand feet below.

    Seeking rescue from my malaise, I purchased a discounted book for a dollar.

    A dollar.

    Even at that price I felt overcharged.

    The subject was humanity’s search for belonging and meaning. On paper this sounded promising. In practice it felt like an essay stretched onto a medieval torture rack until it reached book length. Every chapter seemed padded with repetition and filler. The author’s central insight could have fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin.

    I abandoned it after a few pages.

    Disgusted with both the book and myself, I opened YouTube.

    Then salvation arrived.

    The algorithm presented a kettlebell instructor demonstrating an exercise called thrusters.

    The movement was brutal: a clean, followed by a squat, followed by an overhead press. It looked demanding, athletic, and slightly insane.

    My ennui evaporated instantly.

    I wrote the word “thrusters” into my Google Docs notebook.

    One word.

    That was all it took.

    Suddenly I was excited about tomorrow. I could picture myself waking before dawn, walking into the garage, and attempting this new movement. The anticipation generated more enthusiasm than hundreds of books, dozens of streaming shows, and an entire internet overflowing with content.

    This realization disturbed me.

    I was sixty-four years old. By all cultural expectations, I should have been entering the season of deep reading and contemplation. I should have been savoring great books the way aristocrats savor caviar. Instead, I was ricocheting around the house like a Labrador retriever waiting for someone to throw a tennis ball.

    The truth was difficult to deny. At this stage of my life, only a handful of things reliably pierced the fog. Discovering a beautiful chord progression on the piano. Finding a new kettlebell movement. Learning some technique that made me eager to wake up the next morning.

    Had YouTube not delivered that single word to me—thrusts—I might have spent the entire day wandering through a desert of boredom.

    That is what unsettled me most.

    Not that I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read.

    Not that Europe no longer called to me.

    Not even that writers themselves were abandoning books.

    What unsettled me was how little it took to reignite my enthusiasm. One word on a screen. One exercise. One tiny challenge awaiting me at dawn.

    At sixty-four, after all my reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and philosophizing, the thing that saved the day was not Bach, literature, or civilization.

    It was a kettlebell.

    A simple piece of iron kept me anchored to the tangible world of effort, fatigue, and discipline. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my mental health depended on thousands of kettlebell swings, goblet squats, cleans, and presses performed each week in the garage. That modest space had become my monastery, my therapist’s office, and my refuge. There, amid the clank of iron and the rhythm of controlled exertion, I could process the absurdities, anxieties, and distractions of modern life. The garage was the one place where the noise of the world receded and reality reasserted itself.

    The next day while enjoying the small thrill of introducing new kettlebell movements into my workout—single- and double-handed thrusters, reverse-lunge thrusters, and offset cleans—I had a podcast murmuring in the background, as I usually do. Few pleasures rival the discovery of a new exercise. It is like finding a hidden room in a house you thought you knew by heart.

    The podcast featured Bill Maher interviewing Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. Levinson spoke candidly about addiction, explaining that his own began at age eleven with pharmaceuticals. Addiction, he said, would be a central theme in Euphoria’s final season because it had become one of the defining forces of modern life.

    Levinson then turned to OnlyFans. He described an industry generating revenues comparable to major entertainment sectors while gradually degrading many of the people who participate in it. The descent, he suggested, is often incremental. A few suggestive photos become a stream of content. The stream becomes a livelihood. The livelihood becomes an identity. Before long, the dream of escaping the drudgery of a conventional job transforms into something more unsettling. You become both entrepreneur and product. You begin exploiting yourself for an audience whose appetite is never fully satisfied. The result is a kind of spiritual erosion. The person becomes hollowed out, exhibiting many of the same compulsive traits associated with addiction.

    Maher agreed and argued that most people fail to grasp how profound a cultural shift OnlyFans represents. He said we now live in a “masturbation economy.”

    As I worked through a set of offset cleans, his observation lingered in my mind.

    I have spent the past several years reading about declining rates of dating, sex, marriage, and face-to-face social interaction among younger generations. Increasingly, many people appear content to retreat into simulations of intimacy that deliver pleasure without requiring vulnerability, compromise, rejection, or genuine connection.

    I was reminded of a stand-up routine by Chris Rock. Reflecting on his divorce, infidelity, and pornography addiction, Rock explained that therapy helped him recognize the damage pornography had done to his ability to connect with other people. His provocative way of describing it was that pornography had made him “autistic”—not in the clinical sense, but in the sense that he had become trapped inside his own head, detached from the emotional realities of those around him.

    Listening to Maher and Levinson, I found myself wondering whether this condition had escaped the boundaries of individual pathology and become cultural.

    What if the isolated, screen-mediated existence once associated with addiction is becoming normal?

    What if more and more people prefer substitutes to relationships, simulations to experiences, and curated fantasy to the friction of actual human life?

    What if the dystopia is not approaching but has already arrived?

    As someone who teaches critical thinking and spends an unhealthy amount of time searching for the defining themes of modern culture, I immediately began thinking about how I might frame this discussion in a classroom.

    Maher’s terminology, “the masturbation economy,” works perfectly on television. It grabs attention. It provokes. It entertains.

    But in a college classroom, I would probably use a different phrase.

    I might call it the Solitary Consumption Economy or the Self-Gratification Marketplace.

    Students could then examine the argument that platforms like OnlyFans are not merely examples of personal empowerment but symptoms of a larger cultural shift toward self-exploitation, alienation, dopamine dependency, and emotional isolation.

    Viewed this way, OnlyFans is not an anomaly. It is the logical extension of several trends that have been developing for decades.

    One precursor is the modern obsession with optimization.

    Why endure the messiness of courtship when technology can deliver a carefully curated fantasy tailored to your preferences?

    Why invest time in building a relationship when digital alternatives can be scheduled conveniently between deadlifts and protein shakes?

    Why risk rejection when algorithms offer endless affirmation?

    Optimization culture promises efficiency in every domain of life. The problem is that many of life’s most meaningful experiences are inherently inefficient. Friendship, romance, family, and community require patience, sacrifice, awkwardness, misunderstanding, and compromise. Remove those elements and you often remove the humanity as well.

    A second precursor is the social conditioning produced by the pandemic.

    Many people discovered that life could be organized around isolation. Work from home. Food delivered. Entertainment streamed. Social interaction filtered through screens. For some, this arrangement felt less like an emergency measure than a permanent upgrade. Why drive across town? Why spend money on gas? Why risk discomfort when one can remain safely cocooned inside a personalized digital environment?

    The result is a culture increasingly comfortable with substitutes.

    And the phenomenon extends far beyond sexuality.

    Today people seek fitness coaching, nutritional guidance, therapy, cooking instruction, financial advice, and life direction through screens. Entire industries now exist to provide virtual versions of activities once rooted in face-to-face relationships and local communities.

    As I thought about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Lost in Space that haunted me as a child.

    The episode, “The Promised Planet,” aired in 1968.

    The Robinson family arrives on a planet populated by perpetual teenagers. The inhabitants speak in fashionable slang, dance compulsively, and embrace a culture of endless stimulation. New arrivals are placed in individual booths where a machine bombards them with loud music and psychological conditioning until they become compliant members of the tribe.

    One of the victims is Penny Robinson.

    After undergoing the process, she stands on a platform, swaying mindlessly to the music while parroting clichés about being “with it” and “cool.” Her father watches in horror. He sees that his daughter has not merely adopted new habits. She has surrendered her individuality. She has become a consumer of slogans and sensations.

    The scene terrified me as a child.

    Watching it today is even more unsettling.

    Written nearly sixty years ago, the episode feels less like science fiction than prophecy. Its creators anticipated a world in which overstimulation, conformity, and technological manipulation would become normal features of everyday life. They imagined a generation pacified not by force but by pleasure.

    The frightening possibility is that they were not predicting some distant future.

    They were describing us.

    The Solitary Consumption Economy may simply be the latest chapter in a story that began long ago—a story in which technology gradually teaches us to prefer stimulation over connection, convenience over community, and fantasy over reality.

    The question is not whether a culture of solitary consumption can generate wealth.

    Clearly it can.

    The question is whether a civilization can flourish when increasing numbers of its citizens spend their lives alone inside their heads, consuming experiences engineered to feel more vivid while becoming steadily more detached from reality itself.

    I was hardly immune to the condition. I felt myself being slowly absorbed into a culture that inflamed the passions with dazzling digital spectacles while leaving the spirit flattened, restless, and curiously numb. At times I felt like Penny Robinson in Lost in Space, trapped inside the conditioning booth on The Promised Planet. The machine bombarded her with stimulation until she surrendered her individuality and emerged smiling, dancing, and repeating fashionable clichés. The horror of the episode was not that Penny was physically imprisoned. It was that she no longer wanted to leave. I sometimes wondered whether the same process was happening to me, only with algorithms instead of loud music, screens instead of booths, and an endless stream of digital amusements replacing the hypnotic dance floor.

    Fortunately, I had a few anchors that kept me from drifting into the hypnotic current.

    The first was kettlebells.

    Kettlebells transported me to a world before algorithms, influencers, and engagement metrics. The moment I gripped the handle, I ceased being a sixty-four-year-old college instructor and became a caveman engaged in urgent labor. I was shoving boulders aside to widen the entrance of my cave before a storm arrived. I was lifting the twelve-foot wing of a dying pterodactyl so I could retrieve the spear I had hurled moments earlier to save my life. There was no room for existential angst while trying not to drop fifty pounds of cast iron on your foot.

    Then there was the piano.

    If kettlebells connected me to my inner caveman, the piano connected me to my inner funeral director.

    Whenever I sat at the keyboard, I found myself composing the same melancholy piece over and over again. At least that is what my family claims.

    “Dad, all your songs sound the same.”

    Of course they do.

    I am not composing individual songs. I am contributing to the great collective symphony of human sadness known in German as Weltschmerz—the sorrow that comes from recognizing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

    Some people spend thousands of dollars each year discussing their Weltschmerz with therapists. I process mine through an ebony Yamaha upright. It is considerably cheaper, and unlike a therapist, the piano never asks me how that makes me feel.

    The piano allowed me to grieve.

    Not merely for myself, but for the world.

    For all its absurdities, vanities, and self-inflicted wounds.

    Then there was my exercise bike.

    Technically, it is called a Schwinn Airdyne AD7.

    I prefer its proper name:

    The Misery Machine.

    The Misery Machine operates according to a simple principle: the harder you work, the more enthusiastically it punishes you for your ambition.

    Most cardio equipment is cooperative. You pedal. It politely accepts your effort.

    The AD7 is different.

    The AD7 takes your effort as a personal insult.

    Its giant fan wheel generates wind resistance proportional to your exertion, creating a relationship that feels less like exercise and more like a blood feud.

    The machine seems to say:

    “Oh, you think you’re in shape? You think you’re going to dominate this workout? Let’s investigate that claim.”

    Pedaling is only the beginning.

    Your arms must simultaneously push and pull large moving levers, transforming the experience into a full-body interrogation. Before long your legs are burning, your shoulders are aching, and your lungs are negotiating surrender terms.

    The machine possesses an almost supernatural ability to match your suffering dollar for dollar. Every attempt to overpower it simply persuades it to become more difficult.

    After a hard session, I stagger away drenched in sweat, humbled, exhausted, and oddly grateful, as though I have survived a mugging administered by a highly competent physical therapist.

    I have considered quitting the AD7 many times.

    It consumes an alarming amount of energy.

    Its location does not help.

    Wedged between the living-room wall and the sofa, it places me on public display for my family. There I sit shirtless, wearing gym shorts, with a towel wrapped around my head to prevent sweat from pouring into my eyes. I look less like a disciplined athlete than a man experiencing a minor psychological crisis.

    The real embarrassment, however, lies in the elaborate fantasies I invent to motivate myself.

    My goal is always the same: burn at least seven hundred calories in under an hour.

    To achieve this, my brain constructs increasingly ridiculous scenarios.

    Suppose I reach four hundred calories by the thirty-minute mark.

    In that case, all my colleagues receive half a million dollars tax-free.

    Naturally, they are watching me on a giant monitor.

    A scrolling ticker beneath the screen provides real-time analytics:

    Calories Per Hour: 842

    Fatigue Level: Severe

    Probability of Reaching 400 Calories at 30 Minutes: 98%

    Probability of Reaching 770 Calories at 60 Minutes: 89%

    Butt Fatigue: Catastrophic

    Confidence Level: Medium

    My colleagues watch nervously from their homes.

    “If he hits the target,” one exclaims, “I’ll finally be able to buy a house!”

    Another is already browsing beachfront property.

    A third is planning an early retirement.

    Meanwhile, I continue pedaling through escalating misery, carrying the financial hopes and dreams of people who do not know they are participating in my delusion.

    This, I suppose, is my version of mental gamification.

    Some people use productivity apps.

    Some use motivational speakers.

    I imagine an audience of financially desperate coworkers depending on my ability to survive a torture device disguised as an exercise bike.

    And somehow, absurd as it is, it works.

    Another reason I can’t quit the AD7 is that a part of me craves the punishment.

    It is difficult to overstate humanity’s appetite for self-inflicted suffering. Pain, like pleasure, has a way of making us feel intensely alive. In a culture that anesthetizes us with endless consumption, relentless marketing, algorithmic manipulation, and data mining, punishment can feel strangely restorative. At least it cuts through the fog.

    To put it more simply, without the punishment administered by my exercise bike, I would be bored.

    And boredom is no trivial enemy.

    It reminds me of Father John Misty’s song “Bored in the USA.” The narrator is a weary casualty of consumer culture, a man who has purchased so many products that he has gradually become one himself. Somewhere along the way, he misplaced the larger ambitions and romantic ideals of his youth. The life he was promised never arrived. In its place he received subscriptions, pharmaceuticals, and a collection of possessions that stare back at him with perfect indifference.

    He feels cheated.

    He wants a refund on the Faustian bargain he signed decades earlier, but he suspects the return policy has expired. To cope, he medicates himself. The pills help him endure the boredom, depression, and low-grade despair of modern life, but they cannot cure them. He is a man drowning in ennui, anhedonia, and spiritual exhaustion.

    I recognize those enemies.

    I can hear them rattling the doorknob.

    They arrive disguised as apathy, distraction, and the temptation to stop caring. They whisper that effort is pointless, that curiosity is overrated, that another hour of scrolling might somehow satisfy the hunger that scrolling itself created.

    So I fight back.

    I sit at the piano and pound out another melancholy composition dedicated to the great human tradition of Weltschmerz. I swing kettlebells until my lungs burn and my forearms ache. I climb aboard the AD7 and pedal through fresh layers of misery.

    I do these things with a mixture of fear and fury, hoping that boredom, anhedonia, and despair will decide there are easier victims elsewhere and leave me in peace for another day.

  • P-1426

    P-1426

    There are two people inside me. I have known this since childhood while sitting in dentists’ waiting rooms, flipping through dog-eared copies of Highlights for Children and encountering the two boys who seemed to possess custody of my soul: Goofus and Gallant.

    They appeared in countless moral tableaux. The boys faced identical chores, temptations, conflicts, and dilemmas. Goofus was the patron saint of poor decisions—a sniveling malcontent drawn instinctively toward selfishness, slovenliness, dishonesty, and shortcuts. He seemed to regard the human condition as a personal insult. Gallant, by contrast, beamed with the radiant confidence of a child who had never once disappointed a guidance counselor. He was truthful, virtuous, punctual, generous, and relentlessly wholesome. If Goofus represented original sin, Gallant represented a Hallmark card come to life.

    My parents never subscribed to the magazine. I encountered it only in medical waiting rooms during the early 1970s, so for years I assumed Goofus and Gallant belonged exclusively to my own childhood fever dream. Decades later, I discovered that much had been written about them. Julie Beck, writing in The Atlantic, described the comic strip as a kind of Calvinist morality play in which “their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago—Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder.”

    I’m glad I read Beck’s article because it rescued Goofus and Gallant from the fog of my childhood and confirmed that they were not merely figures from some private fever dream. For years they seemed less like characters from a magazine than recurring visitors from a half-remembered mythology that had taken up residence in my imagination.

    I need that kind of verification because I am one of those unfortunate people whose dreams refuse to remain confined to sleep. They leak into waking life. I rise carrying their residue like smoke trapped in my clothes. Long after the dream has ended, I can still sense its lingering odors, feel its unpleasant film coating the day, and endure the emotional aftershocks of its dark allegories. Some dreams fade by breakfast. Mine can haunt me for days, leaving behind a vague but persistent conviction that I have witnessed something both absurd and deeply accusatory.

    In my dreams, however, I am neither Goofus nor Gallant.

    I am Condemned.

    I am not the villain. I am not the hero. I am merely the witness forced to watch his own downfall unfold. My dreams place me on trial, convict me, and then require me to sit through the sentencing.

    Of all the symbolic collapses I could describe, one stands above the others. To understand my predicament, we must travel to the 2002 Los Angeles Tofu Festival.

    There, I encountered a portable toilet.

    The remarkable thing is that I spent no more than five seconds inside it. I never actually used it. Yet those five seconds altered the trajectory of my life.

    The structure stood alone at the edge of the festival grounds like a forgotten monument to human overconfidence. Its blue plastic walls had faded beneath years of relentless California sun into the color of a bruised sky. Scratches, stains, and scars suggested it had survived several natural disasters and perhaps a minor military campaign. The door sagged slightly on its hinges as though exhausted by the burden of existence.

    Near the top was a peeling service sticker bearing its identity:

    ManCo Portable Solutions

    P-1426

    The designation carried the cold authority of a prison number or military serial code. This was not merely a portable toilet.

    This was P-1426.

    The moment I opened the door and felt the blast of hot air strike my face like the breath of an infernal beast, it became clear that certain human experiences were never meant to be endured.

    I will not describe what I saw. I have no wish to relive the trauma.

    Let us simply say that I appeared to witness a squadron of bat-demons conducting an emergency evacuation from the lower circles of hell. The atmosphere possessed the density of a hostile planet. Heat, stench, and oxygen deprivation united into a perfect storm of biological aggression.

    Then I heard it.

    A voice.

    A cry rising from somewhere deep within the abyss.

    “Help me.”

    The words were unmistakable.

    I staggered backward. I uttered a curse in a voice that did not sound like my own. Then I fled before my body could be officially declared a casualty.

    The experience injured me.

    I required convalescence.

    For nearly a year I lived like a Victorian invalid. I drank herbal tea with ceremonial solemnity. I listened to motivational speakers while lying motionless with my eyes closed and my lower lip trembling. Most of all, I read the Book of Psalms in search of reassurance that humanity had survived comparable ordeals.

    King David had his enemies.

    Job had his boils.

    Ahab had his white whale.

    I had P-1426.

    And the plea for help.

    That plea tormented me because Gallant would have answered it.

    Gallant would have descended into the darkness and rescued the lost soul.

    I did what Goofus would do.

    I fled.

    I abandoned the suffering stranger to whatever horrors lurked within the suffocating blue chamber. I crossed the Valley of the Shadow of Death and returned carrying not triumph but shame.

    I was forty years old at the time. I had endured heartbreak, financial anxiety, family crises, and professional disappointments. Yet standing now in my mid-sixties, I can say with complete confidence that the most transformative event of my life occurred inside a portable toilet during a five-second encounter at a tofu festival.

    I have given this trauma a name:

    The Latrine of No Return.

    A Latrine of No Return is a formative experience so grotesque and spiritually destabilizing that it divides existence into two eras: Before the Incident and After the Incident.

    Before the Incident, I possessed innocence. I trusted civilization. I believed progress was real. I assumed humanity had solved certain fundamental problems.

    After the Incident, those illusions were gone.

    The man who approached P-1426 still believed he might someday become Gallant.

    The man who emerged knew better.

    Being a college writing professor, I naturally attempted to intellectualize the matter. Goofus and Gallant sounded far too juvenile for a man of my sophistication. I therefore rebranded the struggle.

    Goofus became Egregious.

    Gallant became Unctuous.

    I hoped a little linguistic flourish might elevate me above my malaise.

    It did not.

    For twenty years I remained haunted by the cry for help.

    Far from fading, it grew louder.

    Year after year, dream after dream, the voice returned.

    Until one night I awoke with a horrifying realization.

    The soul was still there.

    And if redemption was possible, there was only one course of action left.

    I would have to return.

    I would have to locate P-1426, descend into whatever infernal dimension existed within its blue plastic walls, rescue the forgotten prisoner, and emerge from the depths not merely as a survivor, but as a redeemed man.

    At long last, I would have to become Gallant.

    Hidden in my bedroom one evening with a true crime show on in the background, I called the number for ManCo Portable Solutions while my family was watching TV in the living room. I talked to a man by the name of Manny about my desire to examine the inside of P-1426, but omitted the part where I’m trying to rescue a hostage or a survivor or something like that. Manny repeated P-1426 like it was a familiar utterance, a long-standing part of his world. He said I could come visit P-1426 the next morning, but I’d have to be there at seven. He had to go for a medical appointment at nine regarding kidney stones. 

    The next morning, I drove to an industrial district in Los Angeles. The warehouse stretched across the industrial lot like an aircraft hangar devoted to an unusually specific religion. Row after row of portable toilets stood at attention beneath fluorescent lights, their blue plastic walls reflecting a cold industrial glow. Hundreds of them filled the cavernous space in military formation, creating long corridors that disappeared into the distance. The faint scent of disinfectant hung in the air.  Forklifts sat idle in corners like mechanical beasts resting between campaigns.

    At the center of the warehouse, as if occupying the command post of a strange sanitation empire, sat Manny behind a battered metal desk. The desk looked absurdly small amid the vast kingdom of portable toilets surrounding him. On either side stood two of his newest models, gleaming under the overhead lights. Their plastic surfaces were immaculate, their doors perfectly aligned, their ventilation systems polished and modern. They looked less like portable toilets than luxury automobiles unveiled at a trade show. One could easily imagine Manny regarding them with paternal pride.

    Manny himself appeared less pristine than his products. He wore a blue jumpsuit with the company logo embroidered above the breast pocket. The fabric was clean but permanently wrinkled, as if no amount of laundering could erase decades spent in the sanitation business. His dark hair was combed straight back, and a thick, bushy mustache dominated the lower half of his face. Yet it was his eyes that commanded attention. They were sad eyes, ringed with dark bags and carrying the exhausted expression of a man who had spent a lifetime confronting aspects of human existence most people preferred not to acknowledge. Those eyes suggested that Manny knew things. He had witnessed things. Entire chapters of human history.

    He sat quietly behind his desk, surrounded by his gleaming fleet of state-of-the-art portable toilets, looking less like a businessman than the weary curator of one of civilization’s least celebrated institutions. The new models stood around him like luxury sedans at an auto show, their polished plastic surfaces glowing beneath the fluorescent lights. Manny studied me with a look that combined skepticism, friendliness, and the exhaustion of a man who had spent decades confronting aspects of humanity most people preferred not to think about.

    “What brings you to P-one-four-two-six?” he asked. “That’s an old model. I’ve got newer, much better ones.”

    “I had an encounter with P-one-four-two-six,” I said.

    Manny nodded with surprising seriousness.

    “That happens,” he said. “Some people go to Disneyland. Some people go inside a portable toilet and come out with a story they tell for the rest of their lives.”

    He squinted at me for a moment.

    “You have claustrophobia, don’t you?”

    I nodded.

    “I knew it.” He pointed toward one of the newer units. “Forget P-one-four-two-six. Go with the new Q Series. Far more spacious. Better ventilation. Interior comfort package. Practically a studio apartment compared to those old units. The luxury, my friend. Oh boy.”

    His enthusiasm failed to reassure me.

    “Is everything okay with P-one-four-two-six?” I asked. “Have you inspected it?”

    “Of course.” He nodded. “Clean as a whistle. As good as the day it rolled out of the factory.”

    Then, without warning, his face tightened. He grabbed his side and bent forward.

    “Kidney stones,” he muttered.

    The words came out like a confession.

    I asked him how he got them.

    Manny leaned back in his chair and stared toward the warehouse ceiling.

    “Spinach,” he said bitterly.

    “Spinach?”

    “Spinach. Kale. Spirulina. Green smoothies. The whole wellness cult.”

    He shook his head.

    “My wife got cancer. No insurance. One of the doctors who treated her wouldn’t accept payment plans. Sixty thousand dollars. Maybe more. I paid it. Every penny. I emptied accounts. Took loans. Did whatever I had to do.”

    His voice softened.

    “She got better.”

    He paused.

    “Then she left.”

    The fluorescent lights hummed above us.

    “After that, I figured maybe I should improve myself. Lose weight. Become one of those optimized people you read about. Every morning I drank a blender full of spinach, kale, and enough oxalates to pave a highway.”

    He laughed darkly.

    “Turns out I didn’t become healthy. I became geological.”

    At that moment another wave of pain hit him.

    He clutched his side and let out a cry.

    The sound froze my blood.

    I had heard that cry before.

    Not in this warehouse.

    Not in this city.

    Not even in this decade.

    I had heard it twenty years earlier.

    Inside P-one-four-two-six.

    The same desperate pitch. The same wounded note. The same plea rising from some place of suffering and abandonment.

    My pulse quickened.

    The years collapsed.

    The dream.

    The guilt.

    The voice begging for help.

    It had never come from the portable toilet.

    It had come from Manny.

    Manny was the lost soul.

    The realization struck with the force of divine revelation. For twenty years I had imagined descending into an infernal portable toilet to rescue a stranger trapped in darkness. The entire quest had been wrong. The soul I was searching for had been sitting in front of me all along, wearing a blue jumpsuit and suffering from kidney stones, heartbreak, and the accumulated disappointments of a hard life.

    At that moment I understood my purpose.

    I had not returned to find P-one-four-two-six.

    I had returned to find Manny.

    Manny and I became friends after that.

    At first we met for coffee. Then we played racquetball. Soon we were taking kettlebell classes and struggling through power yoga sessions together, two middle-aged men attempting to negotiate peace treaties with joints that had long ago declared independence. We launched a YouTube channel devoted to men over fifty dealing with loneliness, depression, regret, and the peculiar sensation of realizing that life had quietly become shorter than the road already traveled. We hosted livestreams for men who felt discarded by modern life. We exchanged our recurring nightmares like war veterans comparing old battle scars.

    Most of all, I listened.

    Manny possessed a gift.

    For thirty years he had delivered portable toilets to concerts, festivals, political rallies, county fairs, marathons, and public gatherings of every conceivable variety. In doing so, he had become an accidental anthropologist of human desperation. He had witnessed people lose their minds while waiting in restroom lines. He had watched drunken concertgoers engage in territorial disputes over portable toilets with the strategic intensity of military commanders defending a contested border. He had seen people vandalize his property, attempt athletic feats that defied both physics and common sense, and occasionally injure themselves in ways that seemed to require active imagination.

    Each story was more absurd than the last.

    A man who tried to crowd-surf into a portable toilet.

    A wedding guest who locked himself inside one to avoid dancing.

    A festival attendee who attempted to tip a unit over and succeeded only in tipping himself into a cactus.

    Manny told these stories with the solemn authority of a man delivering ancient wisdom.

    Before long, people couldn’t get enough of him.

    The channel grew.

    The livestream audience expanded.

    Viewers tuned in from around the country to hear Manny explain how portable toilets occupied a strange intersection between civilization and chaos. He could discuss sanitation logistics with the seriousness of a philosopher while describing a music festival toilet emergency with the pacing of a Hollywood action film. He somehow made human waste, loneliness, redemption, and rock concerts feel like chapters from the same grand narrative.

    People adored him.

    I watched as Manny became a minor celebrity.

    His stories were clipped and shared online. Viewers quoted him. Fans approached him after events. Some even asked for selfies with the man who had transformed portable sanitation into a lens for understanding the human condition.

    And I found that I didn’t mind.

    In fact, I was proud.

    For once, I did not feel the need to compete for attention, to claim authorship, or to stand at center stage. I stepped aside and watched Manny flourish. The spotlight suited him. The lonely man who had once sat in a warehouse surrounded by portable toilets now had an audience hanging on every word.

    My wife noticed the change.

    One evening she looked at me and smiled.

    “You know,” she said, “this might be the nicest thing you’ve ever done.”

    I knew what she meant.

    For decades I had worried about obscurity. I had measured myself against impossible standards and imagined success as some distant mountain peak crowned with applause, recognition, and glory. Yet here I was, helping another person find his voice and discovering that the experience brought a deeper satisfaction than any personal acclaim I had ever chased.

    Only then did I understand what had happened.

    I had spent twenty years searching for the lost soul trapped inside P-1426.

    I thought I was rescuing Manny.

    The truth was that Manny had rescued me.

    And in surrendering the spotlight, in helping another person become fully himself without demanding credit or recognition, I had finally achieved the impossible.

    After all these years, I had become Gallant.

  • How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    How G-Shock Flattened Twenty Years of Watch Collecting

    Yesterday I was watching myself play piano on my YouTube channel when I noticed something strange. I could barely focus on the music because my eyes kept drifting toward the Casio G-Shock GW-7900 strapped to my wrist. The watch looked so perfectly correct, so deeply aligned with whatever strange creature I have apparently become, that I caught myself thinking: “That’s it. That’s me. I’m a G-Shock guy.”

    A few hours later I was watching a true-crime docuseries when one of the detectives appeared wearing a Casio G-Shock GWM530. The moment I saw it, some invisible courtroom inside my brain slammed down the gavel.

    Case closed.

    I only want atomic time now.
    I only want resin on my wrist.
    I only want G-Shocks.

    The realization was both satisfying and faintly disturbing, like discovering your subconscious has quietly joined a militant survivalist sect while you were out buying groceries.

    What makes the experience unsettling is that I already possess five beautiful Seiko divers—carefully curated watches representing more than twenty years of obsessive collecting. Those Seikos were not random purchases. They were the result of decades of refinement, experimentation, buying, selling, regretting, and gradually arriving at what I believed was horological enlightenment. They sat in the watch box like sacred artifacts of a fully realized identity.

    Then, roughly four months ago—which psychologically feels more like four geological eras ago—I bought a Casio G-Shock Frogman.

    And the wrecking ball swung.

    The entire architecture of my watch hobby collapsed like a condemned casino in Las Vegas. Out of the rubble emerged a new religion constructed from resin, atomic synchronization, solar charging, and Japanese apocalypse-proof overengineering. I now own five G-Shocks.

    One of them, the Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman, was supposed to be its atomic sibling, the GW-9300. The eBay seller made an honest mistake and shipped the non-atomic version instead. Under normal circumstances this would have triggered a small existential crisis because I have apparently reached the point where the absence of Multi Band 6 synchronization feels like spiritual imprecision.

    But strangely, I didn’t care.

    I bought the watch for half price and immediately designated it my “Hawaii Watch,” reasoning that one does not require atomic synchronization while standing beside an edenic waterfall in Kauai pretending, however briefly, that mortality and property taxes do not exist.

    The whole experience reminds me of something my wife once said about men: they crave violent conversion experiences. In my heart, I know she’s right.

    A suburban man often longs for cataclysm without actual destruction. He wants upheaval without bankruptcy. Reinvention without divorce. Apocalypse without inconvenience. Since detonating one’s real life would be irresponsible, the energy gets redirected into symbolic conversions:

    • watches,
    • motorcycles,
    • kettlebells,
    • backpacks,
    • audio systems,
    • tactical flashlights,
    • sourdough starters,
    • wilderness knives.

    The external change may seem trivial, but psychologically it lands like a thunderclap because obsessive men experience identity through systems of allegiance.

    Objectively speaking, shifting from Seiko divers to G-Shocks is not an event of civilizational importance. No treaties were signed. No governments fell. The stock market did not tremble. Yet inside the mind of an obsessive enthusiast, the transition feels spiritually seismic.

    It genuinely reminds me of Losing My Religion.

    The old religion was:

    • mechanical divers,
    • steel bracelets,
    • sweeping seconds hands,
    • vintage romance,
    • and maritime mythology.

    The new religion is:

    • Tough Solar,
    • Multi Band 6,
    • atomic precision,
    • resin cases,
    • and watches designed to survive tectonic activity.

    The funniest part is that I fully recognize the absurdity of all this. I understand perfectly well that I am a grown man psychologically reorganizing himself around timekeeping devices like a monk discovering a new denomination of Protestantism.

    Which is precisely why I can’t help laughing at myself.

  • Growing Up Obsessed with Barbara Eden

    Growing Up Obsessed with Barbara Eden

    As a kid growing up in the 60s, I became obsessed with I Dream of Jeannie.

    Obsessed may actually be too mild a word.

    I knew every episode by heart. I could anticipate each joke, each misunderstanding, each twitch of Jeannie’s magical powers. None of this diminished my devotion. I was hopelessly enthralled by Jeannie herself, played by Barbara Eden.

    Eventually she began visiting me in dreams.

    Whenever she appeared, beautiful aching music accompanied her presence. She would float through my bedroom window, take my hand, and carry me around the world to exotic destinations glowing beneath moonlight. When I awoke, I could still smell her lingering in the room—honey, sweat, nectar, patchouli—the impossible perfume of longing itself.

    The dreams continued throughout my childhood.

    Then one day I encountered two beautiful sisters, and after that encounter Jeannie stopped visiting me in my dreams forever.

    This story is about those sisters.

    It happened during the spring of 1973 on a warm California afternoon after sixth grade classes had ended. The school bus dropped us off near Crow Canyon Road, and several of us wandered across the street to the local 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees before making the miserable uphill trek home along Greenridge Road.

    Inside the store, the radio was playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” that melancholy yacht-rock masterpiece about romantic disappointment disguised as cheerful singalong music. The frozen-drink machines hummed. The air smelled of sugar syrup, cardboard pizza, and asphalt baking in the afternoon heat.

    That was when the Horsefault sisters entered.

    They were impossible not to notice.

    One was in eighth grade, the other already a sophomore in high school. Both had long blonde hair, freckles, high cheekbones, and mischievous blue eyes that radiated the dangerous energy of girls who enjoyed creating problems merely to see what would happen next. To my sixth-grade brain, they resembled slightly feral versions of Barbara Eden.

    One of them smiled at me and asked:

    “Do you want to see our rabbit?”

    Now, to be clear, I had absolutely no interest in rabbits.

    Had two pimply boys invited me to inspect a caged rodent behind a farmhouse, I would have fled instantly while clutching my cherry Slurpee in terror. But these were beautiful older girls, and beautiful older girls possess the supernatural ability to make adolescent boys enthusiastically volunteer for situations that would otherwise trigger police investigations.

    “Yes,” I said immediately. “I’d love to see the rabbit.”

    Naturally.

    So I followed them.

    We left the 7-Eleven parking lot and walked perhaps a hundred yards down a dusty trail lined with dry horse manure and tall grass swaying in the afternoon breeze. Beyond the field stood their weathered farmhouse, half hidden behind eucalyptus trees and fencing. The place had the unsettling atmosphere of a rural fairy tale where attractive maidens lure travelers into barns never to be heard from again.

    Behind a thicket of bushes stood the rabbit cage.

    It was large enough to imprison a medium-sized farm animal—or an unsuspecting sixth grader. The cage door hung slightly open, and a heavy chain lock dangled ominously from the latch.

    I peered inside.

    No rabbit.

    At that exact moment the sisters burst into shrieking laughter and lunged at me.

    They grabbed my arms and tried to shove me into the cage.

    The truth arrived instantly and with horrifying clarity: there had never been a rabbit. The rabbit was merely bait. I had walked directly into an ambush orchestrated by two hormonally deranged Valkyries whose apparent goal was to lock me inside a cage and transform me into some sort of suburban hostage.

    But they had underestimated me.

    At eleven years old I was already deep into my future bodybuilding destiny and absurdly strong for my age. What followed was less an abduction than a full-contact barnyard wrestling match. We grappled outside the cage rolling through dry grass, hay, and dirt while clouds of dust exploded around us like scenes from a low-budget western.

    Nearby chickens erupted into chaos.

    Inside the coop they flapped wildly, clucked hysterically, and hurled themselves about with the alarm of creatures witnessing either a murder or a satanic fertility ritual.

    The sisters were laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Sweat darkened their halter tops and cutoffs as they struggled unsuccessfully to overpower me. Eventually, exhausted and defeated, they abandoned the mission.

    The moment their grip weakened, I escaped.

    I sprinted home outraged.

    Not merely embarrassed—outraged.

    They had attempted to steal my freedom.

    I stormed into the living room and did what I always did when emotionally overwhelmed by the complexities of existence: I turned on I Dream of Jeannie.

    That night Jeannie came to me one final time.

    As always, she floated silently through my bedroom window accompanied by that beautiful aching music that seemed to emerge from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

    But this time something was different.

    She looked sad.

    “The Horsefault sisters want you now,” she explained softly. “It’s time for you to return their affections. They are real girls. Girls who do not drift through bedroom windows inside moonlit clouds.”

    I argued desperately.

    I told her I loved her.

    But she only smiled with melancholy tenderness before slowly retreating backward into a gray mist that swallowed her completely.

    Then she vanished forever.

    After that night, the dreams changed.

    No more Jeannie.

    No more moonlit flights across the world.

    Instead my dreams became feverish and earthly. They featured rabbit cages beneath silver moonlight, hayfields trembling in the wind, and sweat-soaked girls in cutoffs and halter tops chasing me through cornfields while laughing hysterically.

    “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” they cried.

    Over and over.

    And just like that, childhood fantasy gave way to adolescent bewilderment.

    I never watched I Dream of Jeannie again.