Cinemorphosis

Tag: poetry

  • When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    When Writing Stops You From Lying to Yourself

    Kafka called writing a form of prayer. Not as piety, but as precision. Prayer, properly understood, is the act of stepping out of ordinary time—the noisy, transactional churn—and entering a space where attention is no longer scattered but gathered. Writing does the same. It refuses the chaos of profane time and insists, however briefly, on the discipline of the sacred.

    The sacred is not mystical fog. It is clarity stripped of dopamine. It is the quiet room where you examine the state of your own soul without distraction or performance. It is where you test whether your words can survive contact with your actions. It demands humility because it exposes how often they don’t. And it offers a kind of nourishment the chronophage—the great time-eating machine—cannot provide, because it cannot be consumed passively. It must be earned.

    To live thoughtfully is to move between two worlds: the sacred and the profane. You cannot remain in either one. You must descend into the ordinary—work, errands, obligations—but carry with you the standards forged in that quieter space. Otherwise, the sacred becomes theater, and the profane becomes drift.

    So the question arrives, unwelcome but necessary: Do my actions align with my ideals? No. Not yet.

    If they did, my life would contract, not expand. I would eat with intention—three meals, no grazing—and call the absence of snacks what it is: a fast, not a deprivation. I would step away from the digital carnival that thrives on FOMO, because I know its rewards are counterfeit—brief spikes followed by longer, duller lows.

    I would stop buying watches. I already own more than I can meaningfully wear. Two G-Shocks tell perfect time. The rest sit like artifacts of former appetites. Rotation is not variety; it is indecision dressed as sophistication.

    And I would reconsider what I make. If my videos exist to chase attention, to measure my worth in clicks and spikes of approval, then they are extensions of the same problem. The medium is different; the mechanism is identical. But if a video can carry an idea forward—if it can clarify rather than agitate—then it earns its place.

    Writing, then, is not an escape. It is a reckoning. It is the act of bringing the sacred into contact with the profane and asking, without flinching, whether they agree. Most days, they don’t. The work is to narrow that distance.

  • The Theology of the Watch Addict

    The Theology of the Watch Addict

    You cannot understand watch obsession without understanding religious conversion. At some point, the hobby stops being about objects and starts behaving like faith.

    No one would seriously claim a timepiece is divine. And yet the devoted enthusiast approaches the hobby with the discipline, ritual, and emotional seriousness of a Trappist monk. This is not shopping. This is vocation.

    Every serious collector eventually enters the desert.

    There comes a period of withdrawal—no forums, no influencers, no hype lists—just the quiet work of figuring out what you actually like. The goal is purity. To borrow from René Girard, mimetic desire is heresy. Buying what the tribe loves is imitation. Discovering your own taste is revelation.

    But the desert is temporary. No believer practices alone forever.

    Soon enough, the enthusiast returns to the congregation: YouTube channels, forums, group chats, wrist-shot threads. What gets called “research” becomes a daily ritual. Hours pass in a fever swamp of comparisons, debates, rumors, and release speculation.

    The information is secondary.

    The real function is Research Communion—the comfort of shared obsession, the quiet reassurance that you belong to a fellowship that speaks your language and validates your concerns about case thickness and lume performance.

    Like any conversion, the watch enthusiast lives in two eras: Before Watches and After Watches.

    Before was vague. Time passed unnoticed. Evenings disappeared into the fog.

    After is different. The day has structure. The wrist has meaning. Life feels sharper, more intentional, more alive—because something small and precise is always there, quietly marking your existence.

    But faith has its trials.

    There are dark nights: compulsive buying, financial regret, obsessive comparison, the creeping suspicion that you’ve become what outsiders call a Watch Idiot Savant. Friends don’t understand. Some quietly decide you’ve become strange.

    If the devotion is real, this doesn’t weaken the believer. It deepens the bond with the tribe.

    An us-versus-them mentality emerges. Non-watch people become a separate species—citizens of a dull world where time is checked on phones and meaning is measured in convenience. Meanwhile, a private conviction grows stronger: the world doesn’t understand your discernment, your discipline, your eye.

    But beneath all the brands, movements, and materials lies the true object of devotion.

    The enthusiast is not chasing watches.

    He is chasing order.

    He is chasing the feeling that somewhere, something is precise, aligned, and under control. He is searching for the pure and absolute in the form of Sacred Time.

    This condition has a name: Sacred Time Syndrome.

    It is the quiet belief that a watch is not merely a tool but a wearable altar where chaos is subdued and existence ticks in disciplined submission. The wearer does not simply check the hour; he consults it. Atomic synchronization feels like divine correction. A perfectly regulated movement suggests moral virtue. Drift becomes an existential failure.

    Underneath the talk of lume, tolerances, and finishing lies the real motive: the hope that if time on the wrist is exact, then life itself might also be brought into alignment.

    Because the deeper fear is this:

    Time is vast.
    Time is indifferent.
    Time is not impressed by your collection.

    So the enthusiast keeps buying, adjusting, comparing—not for status, not for craftsmanship, not even for pleasure.

    He is purchasing small, precise moments of reassurance that the universe, at least on his wrist, still answers to order.

  • When Bold Becomes Desperate: The Toxic Green Frogman I Didn’t Buy

    When Bold Becomes Desperate: The Toxic Green Frogman I Didn’t Buy

    The limited-edition G-Shock Frogman GW-8200TPF-1 is called the “Three-Striped Poison Dart Frog,” a name that tells you everything you need to know. Its case and bezel are streaked in oily black and radioactive neon green, a visual homage to the rainforest amphibians whose skin carries enough toxin to tip a hunting arrow. The watch doesn’t whisper. It hisses. It looks less like a timepiece and more like something that escaped from a biohazard lab. And I have to admit: I could see it on my wrist.

    Which is precisely the problem.

    I am sixty-four years old. This watch belongs on the arm of a young man who still believes the world is a stage and he is the headliner. On me, it risks reading like a cautionary tale. I picture myself as the suburban retiree on a zebra-striped Harley, shirtless under a leather vest, ponytail fluttering, ears weighed down with fishing-lure jewelry. Not rebellion—neediness. Not confidence—pleading. In this light, the Poison Dart becomes what I now recognize as a Final Cry Watch: the late-career purchase meant to shout, I’m still dangerous, when the quieter truth is that one is negotiating a truce with time.

    And yet the attraction persists. That’s the uncomfortable part. Awareness does not cancel desire; it merely narrates it. A part of me even welcomes the idea of restraint—the sedation that comes from declining the spectacle, choosing dignity over fluorescent self-advertisement.

    In the end, what saved me was not wisdom but suspicion. That dramatic spray coating—how long before it fades, chips, or peels? And when the neon begins to die, what remains? Not a bold statement. Not a heroic relic. An Insult Watch—a once-loud object aging badly, like a midlife impulse left out in the sun.

    So the purchase died where many impulses should: in the quiet courtroom of anticipated regret. The Poison Dart remains what it probably was all along—not destiny, not transformation, just a bright, dangerous flirtation with caprice.

  • Feedback Latency Intolerance

    Feedback Latency Intolerance

    Feedback Latency Intolerance is the conditioned inability to endure even brief gaps between action and response, produced by prolonged immersion in systems that reward instantaneous acknowledgment. Under its influence, ordinary delays—seconds rather than minutes—register as emotional disturbances, triggering agitation, self-doubt, or irritation disproportionate to the circumstance. The condition collapses temporal perspective, converting neutral waiting into perceived absence or rejection. What is lost is not efficiency but patience: the learned capacity to exist without immediate validation. Feedback latency intolerance reveals how algorithmic environments retrain emotional regulation, replacing mature tolerance for delay with a reflexive demand for constant confirmation.

    The extent of my deterioration revealed itself recently at a new pancake house. I took my daughter, asked the server what he actually liked on the menu, and obediently ordered the fried chicken biscuit sandwich. Then—already overplaying the moment—I texted my wife to announce my choice, as if this were actionable intelligence. I stared at my phone, waiting for the small red numeral to appear, the sacred 1 that would certify my existence. Forty seconds passed. Forty. I refreshed my screen like a lab rat pressing a lever, convinced something had gone wrong with the universe.

    In that absurd interval, it dawned on me: I had entered a state of pathological impatience, the natural byproduct of prolonged residence in the dopamine swamp of algorithmic life, where self-worth is measured by speed and volume of response. The sensation felt disturbingly familiar. My mind snapped back to stories my mother told about feeding me as a baby. The spoon, freshly loaded with mashed potatoes, would leave my mouth for a brief, necessary refill—and I would erupt in fury, unable to tolerate the unbearable injustice of the spoon’s absence. I screamed not from hunger, but from interruption. Sitting there in the pancake house, refreshing my phone, I realized I had simply upgraded the spoon. This is what too much time inside these machines does to a person: it doesn’t make you faster or smarter—it makes you an adult who can’t survive a forty-second gap between bites.

  • We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    We All Wanted to be Adopted by The Brady Bunch

    In the hellfire of the summer of 1971—sun like a coin press and every pine needle a tiny oven—I was nine and certain the world owed me a miracle. My family and four others had staked a two-week claim on a rugged patch of Mount Shasta: we fished, water-skied, swatted hornets, and lazed beneath the buzzing halo of a massive battery radio that vomited The Doors, Paul McCartney, Carole King, and Three Dog Night into the pines. It should have been Eden. It should have been bliss. Instead it felt like the production meeting for a childhood trauma.

    One dawn I lay cocooned in my tent, not merely asleep but translating into the rarest dream of my short life. In that vivid pantomime I’d been plucked off our campsite and dropped into San Francisco, standing before a gleaming red cable car with the Brady Bunch beaming at me like a panel of missionary saints. Mike and Carol had already signed the papers. I was family now—promised the split-level, the avocado-green kitchen, my very own bunk. My brain supplied questions with the urgency of a petition: Would I get a room? Would Greg tolerate me? When would they shoot my induction episode?

    Then Mark and Tosh—the twin saviors of sobriety—tore the dream away like a curtain ripped mid-scene. “C’mon, man, fishing,” they croaked, their voices the sound of gravestones being lowered. Fishing? Fishing?! I had been adopted by television perfection and now I was expected to sniff out worms like a commoner. I sulked with the theatricality of a miniature tyrant, trudging the rest of the day with the scowl of a man exiled from paradise, my secret grief lodged like a splinter under the skin of my soul. There was no way to explain. “Sorry, I can’t bait a hook—my new stepfamily needs me on stage.” Right. I bit my lip and chewed on humiliation.

    My father barked like a sergeant and cut the melodrama down with a single order: “Get with the program. We’re living in the wild.” The wild, he meant, with its yellowjackets circling our biscuits and a lake full of indifferent fish. I wanted the Brady kitchen, not a fishing pole and a chorus of stings. The pointy little deaths of mosquito bites and the cheap tin of powdered pancake mix were the actualities. The dream stayed lodged; reality kept showing us its rough, unvarnished palm.

    That sulking boy at Mount Shasta believed his fantasy was a portal out of chaos—a personal miracle nobody else would imagine. The joke is that it wasn’t original. Millions of American children were fed the same sedatives: thirty-minute morality plays in which family harmony was manufactured to lipstick level. While we bathed in their canned warmth, the actors backstage were burning through lives: addiction, affairs, fights that would make our own messy households look like spas. The dissonance between stage-gleam and soap-opera sludge is almost religious in its cruelty.

    Should we expect actors’ private lives to line up with the squeaky-clean product they sell? Of course not. It would be as reasonable to expect Superman to sort his recycling. Hollywood is a factory of facades: glossy façades varnished over dysfunction. The Brady Bunch was the perfect exhibit—an engineered Eden whose actors were stuck inside their own human messes. Yet we kept praying to that televised altar because fantasy is sweet and often cheaper than facing the real family across your table.

    Decades later, the fantasy will still sneak up on me. Sometimes I dream my face is a square in that opening montage—cheeks plump, grin kerchiefed to perfection—living, forever, inside a clapboard postcard where problems resolve in thirty minutes. In the dream I am blissfully ignorant of the backstage carnage. I wake up with that small, ridiculous ache—a taste for a world that never existed, an appetite for a comfort that, like cheap candy, rots faster than it satisfies.

  • Rising Above the Wreckage: Finding Meaning in the Broken Phase

    Rising Above the Wreckage: Finding Meaning in the Broken Phase

    For the last several years, I have been haunted by the lines of Yeats’s poem The Second Coming: “the center will not hold; anarchy is loosed upon the world.” A.I., deepfakes, the social media fever swamp, and deranged populists seem to have splattered into a chaotic universe. It’s tempting to surrender to nihilism, declare it all over, and use that declaration as an excuse to live with reckless disregard—eat chocolate cake three times a day and go completely to pot.

    But I know that impulse is folly. Viktor Frankl is right: we don’t get to choose the meaning of our lives. Life presents challenges within our particular circumstances that force us to rise up, stand to attention, and embrace the meaning laid before us. To live this way is to live in kairos—meaningful time.

    So what does it mean to rise above? What are the circumstances we now inhabit? These questions animate Alana Newhouse’s essay “Everything Is Broken.” Written ten months after the pandemic, in January 2021, Newhouse and her husband know something is wrong with their newborn son but cannot get answers from the medical establishment as they undergo what she calls a “Kafkaesque medical mystery journey.” By sheer luck, they finally discover their son’s rare disease. When they ask a family friend, physician Norman Doidge, why so many medical “experts” failed to diagnose it, he delivers the following diatribe:

    “There are still many good individuals involved in medicine, but the American medical system is profoundly broken. When you look at the rate of medical error—it’s now the third leading cause of death in the U.S.—the overmedication, creation of addiction, the quick-fix mentality, not funding the poor, quotas to admit from ERs, needless operations, the monetization of illness vs. health, the monetization of side effects, a peer review system run by journals paid for by Big Pharma, the destruction of the health of doctors and nurses themselves by administrators, who demand that they rush through 10-minute patient visits, when so often an hour or more is required, and which means that in order to be ‘successful,’ doctors must overlook complexity rather than search for it . . . Alana, the unique thing here isn’t that you fell down so many rabbit holes. What’s unique is that you found your way out at all.”

    After diagnosing the ills of medicine, Norman pivots to journalism. Aware he is speaking to two journalists, he asks: “Now, can I ask you two something? How come so much of the journalism I read seems like garbage?”

    Realizing the truth of Norman’s rant, Alana wonders if not just medicine and journalism, but everything, is broken. She resists the thought as hyperbolic, even doomsday, but after reflection she concludes: the center isn’t holding; anarchy has indeed been loosed upon the world. The institutions that once gave us sense, order, and trust are fractured.

    When did the fracturing begin? She traces it back to the 1970s, when business lowered labor costs with “labor-saving technology” and offshore jobs. The tech revolution followed, making the American Dream more precarious than ever. As workers were paid less and less, they entered what she calls a condition of flatness—a hollowed uniformity in which institutions persist yet fail in eerily similar ways.

    We now live in an age of commodified experience—flat, Uncanny Valley-like, predictable. In a state of flatness, critical thinking atrophies and people can be led to believe almost anything: that Iran is trustworthy, that there are no biological differences because gender is purely social construction, or that tech lords can transfer massive assets to themselves and polarize society without consequence. She writes, “Seduced by convenience, we end up paying for the flattening of our own lives.” Stupid ideas proliferate because flatness produces stupidity.

    Newhouse reserves most of her ire for the Woke as the source of stupidity, which to my consternation means she leaves equally idiotic Right-wing trolls comparatively unscathed. Still, her central thesis—that we are in a Broken Phase, that cycles of collapse are part of the human condition, and that our current state is not permanent—gives me a measure of comfort. It reminds me to be strong, to rise up, and to embrace a life of meaning.

  • Return to the Womb

    Return to the Womb

    I’m three months shy of turning sixty-four, which means I’m old enough to know better and still young enough to entertain delusions. This is a warning to the under-sixties: prepare yourselves. At some point in your late fifties, strange desires start slithering into your psyche like vines through the cracks of a neglected greenhouse. With every new creak of the knees and fresh batch of funeral notices, a part of you will yearn for what I call the Return to the Womb.

    No, not literally—though if you could slide back into a warm amniotic bath and unplug the Wi-Fi, you just might. I’m talking about a psychological regression: the desperate, half-sane longing to be swaddled in tropical heat, to dissolve into mango-scented breezes, and to vanish into a seaside stupor under a drizzle that feels vaguely divine. The dream? To marinate in comfort, far from the cacophony of deadlines and dental appointments, in a climate designed by God for the perpetually tired.

    I was born in Gainesville, Florida in 1961, and to this day I remember the fetid perfume of alligator swamps—a heady, sulfuric funk that now strikes me as oddly comforting. Like Vicks VapoRub for the soul. Is it any surprise that I scroll Zillow listings for barrier islands in South Carolina, Georgian marshlands, and steamy Floridian enclaves? I’m not looking for a home. I’m looking for a feeling—a fetal, lizard-brained feeling that I’ve convinced myself might still be hiding in the heat.

    But here’s the rub: I don’t trust this impulse. This Return to the Womb isn’t a noble call to simplicity. It’s a siren song, crooned by the dark twin of the Life Force—the same demon that tells you to skip your workout, order DoorDash, and stream ten hours of King of the Hill in a comfort-food trance. It whispers of paradise, but it’s peddling paralysis. It’s not vitality. It’s a prelude to decay, dressed in Tommy Bahama and sipping a piña colada.

    Writers like Steven Pressfield and Phil Stutz have been wise to this force for years. Pressfield calls it the Resistance. Stutz names it Part X. Adam Smith, bless his powdered wig, simply called it the need for “self-command”—the daily decision to wrest meaning from entropy, to choose virtue over sloth, action over inertia.

    During the pandemic lockdown, I got a taste of this regression. Sitting masked in my accountant’s office in February 2021, she asked if I was thinking of retirement. Was I thinking of it? Lady, I was living it—in pajamas, in slow motion, surfing real estate listings for stilt houses on Key Biscayne while sipping overpriced Nespresso and pretending buckwheat groats were the secret to immortality. My body had synchronized with the rhythm of a hot tub. I wanted nothing more than to stay submerged.

    Four years later, I still want it. I still want the warm drizzle, the midnight ocean swims, the faint smell of coconuts mingled with chlorine and sea rot. And yet—I know. I know. I know that the moment I submit to this dream of endless hammock-lounging is the moment the soul begins to curdle.

    Phil Stutz, in Lessons for Living, writes about Father Time as a pitiless, judgmental figure—not the kindly old man of greeting cards, but a stern cosmic accountant. He doesn’t care how many steps you walked or how clean your macros were. He wants to know: Did you spend your time on Earth doing something that mattered?

    As someone who’s worshipped at the altar of diver watches for two decades, who has pondered the geometry of bezels and the metaphysics of lume, I took this personally. Time is not just money. Time is judgment. Time is an indictment.

    And the Return to the Womb? It’s a slow lobotomy in paradise. It’s “brain rot” dressed as a beach vacation. It’s the comforting lie that you’ve earned an escape from purpose. But the truth is, the older I get, the stronger this impulse grows. And that, frankly, terrifies me.

    Still—and here’s the kicker—as I type this, I want it. I want the coconuts. I want the warm rain. I want the mangoes. I want the beach walks at twilight where nothing hurts and no one needs anything from me.

    We are mad creatures, aren’t we? Our intellect sees the trap. Our soul feels the pull. And some part of us, no matter how wise or weathered, still wants to disappear into the dream.

  • The Wind Stole My Midterm

    The Wind Stole My Midterm

    Last night I dreamed I was co-teaching a college course on health and mixed martial arts with Eliot—the bearded jazz musician who moonlights as a Trader Joe’s clerk. He was fired up like a preacher at a tent revival. I, on the other hand, had the enthusiasm of a dogwalker who’s just spotted a fresh pile and no bag.

    Eliot, bless his plaid soul, had prepped a morning exam for his students—neatly typed, stapled, and probably color-coded. Meanwhile, I forgot I was even supposed to give a test. My lectures were improvised jazz solos, long on flair and short on structure. I’d wander into class and riff about cholesterol, Muay Thai, or the history of granola, depending on my mood or what I’d eaten for breakfast.

    But here’s the kicker—I had better material. Buried under the kitchen of my imaginary mansion was a secret archive: white binders filled with decades of syllabi, obscure readings, quizzes, interviews, and errant genius. I never used them. Too lazy. Too proud. Too me.

    Eliot, the eager grasshopper, somehow discovered the hidden staircase that led to the front porch—don’t ask how dream architecture works—and climbed it with evangelical zeal. I watched from my perch in a bathrobe, coffee in hand, while he scaled those steps like a man training for the Tour de France. When he reached the door, breathless and bright-eyed, he begged for the archive.

    So I gave it to him—several white binders, edges fraying like the conscience of a plagiarist. He held them like sacred scrolls, eyes gleaming with the same reverence I once had before tenure made me soft and cynical. I felt a flicker of gratitude. At least someone would use them. At least the work would live on.

    Then came the twist.

    He informed me, with the officious glee of a parking enforcer, that according to some obscure clause in the college handbook, I’d have to sit for his early-morning exam to renew my credential. Me—the man who had literally written the test’s DNA. I considered studying, briefly. Then I took a nap instead.

    The exam was held in the middle of a chaotic street fair, somewhere between a kettle corn booth and a band playing off-key Fleetwood Mac covers. Wind tore through the papers like it was auditioning for a disaster movie. Test pages flew like startled pigeons, and students chased them in panic. It was academic absurdism, pure and uncut.

    And me? I was at peace. I knew—somehow, with prophetic clarity—that there would be no consequences. That the wind, the noise, the anarchy, would camouflage my ignorance. Eliot’s students would struggle. I’d bluff. The test would become performance art, and no one would remember the score.

    What separated me from Eliot wasn’t intelligence or experience. It was weariness. He was still playing to win. I was waiting for the buzzer. He taught with the fire of the newly converted. I taught like a man allergic to rubrics and enthusiasm. He saw a future. I saw a pension.

    And maybe, in that dream, I realized I had already started to retire—from effort, from purpose, from caring about the difference between good teaching and showing up with anecdotes and gumption. Eliot wanted to be me. I wanted to be gone.

  • Hugh Hefner’s Watchbox from Hell

    Hugh Hefner’s Watchbox from Hell

    Chapter Three from The Watch Whisperer of Redondo Beach


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    I nodded.

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

    “Can you be more specific?”

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

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

  • Crying at the Sink: The Dishwashing Grammy Awards

    Crying at the Sink: The Dishwashing Grammy Awards

    Don’t ask me why, but there’s something about doing dishes after dinner that turns me into a soft-focus emotional wreck. Somewhere between the soap suds and the rinse cycle, I cue up Rickie Lee Jones’s “Living It Up”—one of my all-time favorite songs—and without fail, it punctures the heart like a stiletto dipped in nostalgia. Tonight, it brought on another weepy micro-moment, which means it’s time to officially give it The Most Likely to Make Me Cry from Too Much Beauty Award.

    This of course sent me spiraling into my own kitchen-sink Grammy ceremony, where I began handing out awards like a deranged emotional sommelier.

    • Todd Rundgren’s “Can We Still Be Friends” wins The Song That Makes You Recommit to Being a Half-Decent Human Being Award. It’s the sonic equivalent of an awkward apology after ruining Thanksgiving.
    • The Isley Brothers’ “Living for the Love of You” earns The Track Most Likely to Be Playing in Heaven When You Arrive Award—assuming heaven has good speakers and excellent taste.
    • Yes’s “And You and I” takes home The Sounds-Like-It-Was-Composed-by-Angels-on-a-Mountain-Top Award. I don’t know what dimension that song came from, but it wasn’t this one.
    • John Mayer’s “No Such Thing” is given The Makes You Happy to Be a Living, Breathing Fool Award. It’s that rare pop song that makes you want to fist-pump your own mediocrity.
    • The Sundays’ “You’re Not the Only One I Know” walks away with The Makes Sadness So Gorgeous You Forget to Be Upset Award. It’s a musical sigh pressed between lace and rain.

    I could keep going—my brain has a whole red carpet lined up—but I’ve got another episode of Sirens on Netflix to cry through. Turns out the best part of my day is a cross between dish soap, beautiful songs, and low-level existential unraveling. What a life.