Cinemorphosis

Tag: short-story

  • Thou Shalt Not Cram Thine Enormous Head into Symbols of Conformity

    Thou Shalt Not Cram Thine Enormous Head into Symbols of Conformity

    The Canyon High locker room smelled like a crime scene of adolescence—dirty socks fermenting in old sneakers, wet towels decaying in piles, and the sour musk of Old Spice cologne trying to mask failure. I sat on a cold bench, wearing my junior varsity football uniform—pants, cleats, pads, and a white jersey that clung to me like a bad decision. On the bench beside me gleamed a red helmet, polished to an evil shine. It looked less like protective gear and more like an executioner’s hood with a face mask.

    Greg Migliore and Gil Gutierrez—two teammates with all the empathy of drill sergeants—were looming over me.
    “Put on the helmet,” Migliore said. “O-line drills in five minutes.”
    “Don’t rush me,” I said. “This may take a minute.”
    Gutierrez folded his arms. “We’ve got to be on the field now.”
    “Look at that thing,” I said, nodding toward the red dome. “It’s way too small.”
    “No, it isn’t,” said Gutierrez. “That’s the biggest one.”
    “But my head’s huge.”
    Migliore rolled his eyes. “My head’s bigger and it fits fine.”
    “It’s not just the size,” I said. “It’s the shape. Mine’s like a misshapen pumpkin.”
    “Put the damn thing on,” said Gutierrez, tired of my existential crisis.

    I obeyed, sort of. I placed the helmet on top of my head like a crown for a reluctant monarch. It perched there, refusing to descend.
    “I told you—it’s too small.”
    “Jesus, McMahon, are you crazy?” Gutierrez barked. “Pull it all the way down.”

    Before I could protest, Gutierrez grabbed the helmet and forced it onto my head. My skull shrieked in silence. My temples were in a vise, my ears screaming in protest, my lungs begging for oxygen.
    “Jesus, it’s tight!” I gasped. “I can’t breathe!”
    “You’ll get used to it,” Migliore said, clearly an optimist about cranial suffocation.

    I didn’t get used to it. I screamed—an unholy, primal shriek—and ripped the helmet off like it was on fire. My ears throbbed as if I’d peeled them off with the facemask.
    Gutierrez and Migliore collapsed in laughter.
    “It’s not funny!” I shouted, my face crimson. “I almost died!”
    They laughed harder, which only deepened my martyrdom.
    “You think this is funny? Great. Tell Coach Croswell I quit.”
    “Quit?” Migliore said. “You haven’t even started.”
    “Yeah, well not being able to wear the helmet kind of ruins the experience.”
    Migliore turned to Gutierrez. “The dude’s got claustrophobia.”
    “Stage three,” I said. “Can’t ride elevators. Tell the coach it’s over.”
    “You’re the biggest freshman in the school,” Gutierrez said. “He’s going to flip.”
    “Then tell him I’m a claustrophobic pacifist. I don’t even like football. I was doing this as a favor, but it’s not working out.”

    I changed back into my civilian clothes and went home, where Master Po awaited—my inner monk of bad timing.
    “Master Po,” I said, “should I feel guilty for quitting?”
    “Grasshopper,” he said, “you must know the difference between self-improvement and self-distortion. Even if you conquered your fear of closed spaces, you’d still hate football. Do not pursue what pleases others. The Way of Heaven does not strive—yet it overcomes.”
    “That’s nice,” I said. “But Coach Croswell’s going to want something more tangible than Zen paradoxes.”
    “You owe him no explanation,” Po said. “Reveal your true self. Your authentic life will speak for itself.”
    “Maybe,” I said. “But I’m pretty sure my authentic life is going to be running extra laps tomorrow in P.E.”

  • Thou Shalt Not Measure Thy Goodness Against Fools

    Thou Shalt Not Measure Thy Goodness Against Fools

    In eighth grade, Erika Jenkins was every boy’s favorite target—a tall, freckled volleyball player with legs that seemed to go on for miles and a face that couldn’t hide her fear. The boys called her Horse, Giraffe, Hyena, Zebra—an entire menagerie of cruelty. Every morning she had to walk the gauntlet from her locker to the corridor, clutching her books to her chest like a shield, her eyes darting from side to side as if she were trying to survive a nature documentary. She looked like someone bracing for an attack, because she was.

    Then summer arrived—and performed a miracle. Her grandmother took her on a Caribbean cruise, and somewhere between the turquoise waves and the buffet line, Erika Jenkins molted. When she returned that fall, she was unrecognizable. The boys at Canyon High buzzed with talk of “The Caribbean Transformation.”

    At lunch on the first day, she made her debut. Gone was the awkward, lanky girl. In her place stood someone who could have walked off a shampoo commercial. She wore a sleeveless white linen dress that caught the light, her tan skin glowing like toasted sugar. Her once-flat hair now tumbled over her shoulders in glossy brown waves. Her limbs, once all elbows and knees, now belonged to a young woman who had grown into herself.

    The same boys who had brayed at her like hyenas now worshiped her like pilgrims before a shrine. They tripped over themselves to compliment her, their awe soon sliding into the same loutish cruelty—just with a new vocabulary. The tone changed from mockery to hunger, but the malice was the same. By October, Erika Jenkins vanished—transferred, rumor had it, to a small private school where maybe she could breathe.

    I was furious—but not for noble reasons. I had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. And now she was gone, like a dream that evaporates the moment you wake.

    That night, I asked Master Po why her story hadn’t followed the script of The Ugly Duckling. “Why wasn’t there a happy ending?” I asked.

    “Because, Grasshopper,” he said, “not all fairytales are true. The boys mocked her when she was an ‘ugly duckling,’ and they mocked her again when she became a ‘beautiful swan.’ Only their weapons changed—from insult to lust. They remained prisoners of their malice. It was they, not she, who failed to evolve.”

    He said this with a sharpness I wasn’t used to. “But I never teased her,” I protested. “Not once.”

    “Do not congratulate yourself for being less vile than the wicked,” he said. “You still measured your worth by their ugliness. You did not defend her. You simply waited for your turn to possess her beauty. Her radiance blinded them—and you as well.”

    “Are you saying I’m no better than they are?”

    “I am saying,” Master Po said, “that even a moth believes itself noble until it burns in the flame. I can already see you falling from the sky.”

    He was right, of course. My heartbreak wasn’t about Erika’s suffering—it was about my own loss. I didn’t mourn her pain. I mourned my missed opportunity to bask in her glow. Even in my sympathy, I was self-absorbed. Master Po saw the rot beneath my pity.

    He always did.

  • Your Tears Won’t Change the World

    Your Tears Won’t Change the World

    When I was thirteen, I decided the path to popularity ran straight through Soul Train. I spent months studying the dance troupe Captain Crunch and the Funky Bunch, who could pivot from the robotic precision of the Funky Robot to doing splits so fast you’d think they were animated. I practiced every night in front of my bedroom mirror until my limbs clicked like clockwork and my expression was as vacant as a mannequin’s. I was ready to unleash my Funky Robot at the Earl Warren Junior High dance.

    The playlist that night was pure chaos. Whoever the DJ was, he seemed to be drawing songs from a hat. “Free Bird” dragged like a eulogy, “Walk This Way” felt like cardiac arrest, and “Midnight at the Oasis” was exactly what it sounded like—a languid romp in the desert. But when Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” came on, I sprang into motion. My body jerked and popped with righteous purpose. I was a mechanical deity in Adidas, a human jukebox powered by insecurity.

    By some miracle of social physics, I ended up dancing all night with Cheryl Atkins—the prettiest girl there—because her boyfriend Rick hated to dance. While we funked and twirled under the mirrored ball, I noticed the misfits pressed against the gym walls like condemned prisoners. They’d ask for dances, get shot down, and limp back to their corner of despair. Watching them, I felt an unexpected pang—an ache sharper than any muscle burn.

    Meanwhile, the popular eighth-graders were perfecting a ritual called “getting wasted,” which apparently involved puking and maintaining high social standing at the same time. As a Junior Olympic weightlifter, I found this baffling. I could clean and jerk my body weight, but I couldn’t comprehend how vomiting could make you cool.

    By the end of the night, Cheryl and I won the dance contest. Vice Principal Gillis handed me a trophy, but instead of basking in my Funky Robot glory, I felt hollow. The faces of the wallflowers haunted me. That night, I dreamed of a beach where a giant elephant seal handed each lonely misfit a beautiful radio, and as they tuned it, they glowed and vanished into the horizon. I woke up certain of one thing: radios were holy.

    “Master Po,” I said, “the world is cruel. I can’t be happy knowing people like those misfits suffer.”
    “Spare me your tears, Grasshopper,” he said. “Sadness feels noble, but it’s an addiction. It comforts the ego while changing nothing.”
    “But what can I do?” I asked. “Darwin was right—the strong thrive, and the weak pay the price.”
    “Indeed,” he said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re one of the weak. So tend your own garden, Grasshopper. The misfit must save himself before he can save the world.”

  • The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

    The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

    After sixth grade let out, the bus would drop us on Crow Canyon Road, and my friends and I would stumble across the street to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee before the long, lung-searing climb up Greenridge Road. One hot spring afternoon, as I stood under the humming fluorescent lights, brain half-frozen by cherry ice and “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” pouring from the store radio, two blonde sisters drifted in like mirages from a Beach Boys song. They were the Horsefault sisters—freckled, sunburned, and perilously beautiful, with high cheekbones and figures that looked imported from a drive-in double feature starring Raquel Welch and Adrienne Barbeau.

    “Wanna see our rabbit?” they asked.

    Normally, my interest in rabbits was zero, caged or otherwise. But I was eleven, and the sisters had the sort of gravitational pull that makes a boy agree to anything. So I said yes.

    We walked a dirt path behind the 7-Eleven, through a field glazed in golden light and peppered with horse droppings that crunched underfoot. Their farmhouse loomed ahead, half hidden behind a thicket of bushes. And there it was: the cage. A huge metal pen with its door cracked open, a thick chain dangling like a warning.

    “There,” one of them said.

    I peered inside. No rabbit. Just straw, shadows, and the faint smell of hay and mischief. Then came the cackling—witchlike, gleeful—as the sisters lunged, grabbing my arms and trying to shove me into the cage. It dawned on me that I was living a low-budget horror film: The Boy Who Should Have Stayed at 7-Eleven.

    They tugged; I resisted. Dust rose around us like smoke as we wrestled in the grass, the air thick with sweat, laughter, and the unmistakable scent of adolescence gone rogue. Chickens screamed from a nearby coop as if alerting the countryside to my peril. Then, mid-grapple, something shifted: the danger took on a strange sweetness. The idea of being locked in that cage suddenly didn’t seem so terrifying. In fact, it sounded… educational.

    But the Horsefault sisters, realizing I was enjoying this little apocalypse of innocence too much, let go. We stood, panting, brushing hay from our shirts like dazed gladiators. Without a word, they turned toward the farmhouse, and I trudged home, confused, awakened, and very much alive.

    That night, I couldn’t sleep. My body was staging a mutiny.

    “Master Po,” I whispered to the ceiling. “I seem to have a new affliction. It’s keeping me up.”

    “Your body,” came his serene voice, “is prey to desire. Do not despair. You are becoming one with nature. You should be happy.”

    “Happy? I’m miserable.”

    “To hide your desire gives it power,” he said.

    “Believe me, it’s not hidden.”

    “Excellent. Desire is both a blessing and a burden.”

    “What’s the good news?”

    “It means you’re alive and growing.”

    “And the bad news?”

    “It never ends.”

    I frowned at the ceiling. “Master Po?”

    “Yes, Grasshopper?”

    “I wish I hadn’t fought them off. I wish I were in that cage right now.”

    “It’s too late. What’s done is done. Learn from it. In time you’ll understand your desire instead of fearing it.”

    “What if there’s no future for me in that department?”

    “You’re eleven,” he said dryly. “Your future is nothing but departments.”

    “Peace seems impossible.”

    “Remember, Grasshopper,” he said, fading into the dark, “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”

    “Then I must be radioactive,” I muttered, staring at the ceiling, waiting for peace—or the Horsefault sisters—to return.

  • Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    When I was ten, I made the catastrophic decision to watch an ABC Movie of the Week called The Screaming Woman, based on a Ray Bradbury short story. The premise was simple: a woman buried alive, screaming for help. But to a ten-year-old with an overactive imagination, it was psychological napalm. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind was the muffled plea of a mud-caked corpse clawing her way out from under my bed.

    One night, trembling in a sweat-damp cocoon of sheets, I turned to my imaginary Zen tormentor, Master Po, and asked, “Why am I so stupid, Master? Why did I watch a movie designed to murder my sleep?”

    “Ah, Grasshopper,” he said, with the unhurried calm of someone who’s never paid a utility bill, “the woman buried in a shallow grave is not your enemy. She is your teacher. She shows you the short bridge between life and death. You imagine the bridge as long, but in truth it is a nub, barely the length of a thought. Horror films remind you that you are always one bad turn from the dirt nap.”

    “That’s profound, Master, but I still can’t sleep.”

    “You mustn’t flee from the woman under your bed,” he said. “You must reach into the grave and pull her out. In saving her, you save yourself.”

    “I’m not going near a grave,” I said. “I have claustrophobia.”

    “Life and death,” he replied, “are the same thing seen from opposite sides of the same coin.”

    “I prefer the life side, thank you.”

    “You cling to your vantage point because you think it’s fixed,” he said, with the patience of a man lecturing a doorknob. “But it will shift. When you accept change, death will no longer frighten you—and once that fear is gone, nothing can stop you.”

    “Nothing? Like I could hit a baseball five hundred feet like Reggie Jackson?”

    Master Po sighed. “No, Grasshopper. You will stop wanting to be Reggie Jackson. And that will be your home run.”

  • It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

    It’s Better to be Smart Than Right

    Sitting in the classroom at Independent Elementary, I’d burned through Mrs. Eckhart’s reading questions and had an hour to kill, so I launched a silent mutiny on a sheet of white art paper. I drew a submarine the size of a small nation—portholes lined up like pearls, each framing a tiny soap opera. In one, a guy flipped pancakes and invited the crew to “swing by my cabin.” In another, a woman in curlers refused to be seen “in this condition.” A cereal enthusiast raged about a missing prize. A hammock napper protested the racket. A girl clutched a shred of apple skin like it was a ticking bomb in her molar. A dozen noisy lives, each complaining, boasting, living. My plan was obvious: practice now so I could write for Mad Magazine later.

    Enter Mrs. Eckhart, patrolling the aisles like customs at the border. Red bouffant immaculate, eyebrows stepped out of a Hitchcock film. She stopped at my desk and stared down at the sub—my U.S.S. Bad Timing.

    “Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

    “I finished the assignment. I’m working quietly.”

    She read my dialogue bubbles aloud, pitch-perfect sarcasm, the kind that knives you with your own words. The class erupted. I was roast beef, she was the carving knife. Then the verdict: “Your parents should know this is how you spend classroom time.”

    She scrawled a note on the back of my masterpiece and demanded signatures before I returned it. At home, Dad examined the evidence like a prosecutor smelling a plea bargain.

    “You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

    “I don’t know why. I finished my work. I was quiet.”

    “It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

    “How?”

    “By finishing early and doodling, you told her the work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

    “I kept quiet. That’s hardly a crime.”

    “In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

    “I thought they were the same thing.”

    “Not always. Today you were technically right and strategically stupid. Go to your room and think about it.”

    In exile, I summoned my emergency therapist: Master Po, Shaolin sage of my imagination.

    “Master Po, why am I the villain for drawing a submarine? And what does ‘be smart, not right’ even mean?”

    “Grasshopper,” he said, voice like wind across stone, “the world is full of educated people who know nothing. Wisdom is entering another’s mind, seeing as they see. Your father is correct. Choose smart over right.”

    “If being right doesn’t count, why learn right from wrong at all?”

    “Model yourself on Heaven’s righteousness,” he said, “but travel the earth with tact. Know what you do not know.”

    “Know what I don’t know? That feels like a riddle you give to people you want to confuse.”

    “You strain at my words as muddy water through a sieve. Clarity will come.”

    “Meanwhile, I’m grounded and missing Hogan’s Heroes.”

    “Unfortunate,” he said, not sounding remotely sorry.

    “Life is a riddle I can’t solve.”

    “You try too hard. Relax. Let go. Answers fall like rain.”

    “I could relax more if Dad paroled me to the television.”

    “Sitting quietly is perfect. With no intention and no movement, you will, like the perfect traveler, arrive.”

    I stared at the ceiling, the paint a milky ocean, my submarine rolled into evidence on the desk. Maybe Dad was right. Maybe Mrs. Eckhart wasn’t grading my drawing so much as my social intelligence—and I’d failed the pop quiz. The adult world prized two currencies: accuracy and tact. I had exact change for the first and lint for the second.

    Still, some small part of me refused to shred the sub and plead guilty to artistic misconduct. Those porthole people—pancake guy, curler lady, apple-skin girl—were ridiculous, yes, but they were also alive, chattering in their cramped circles under a thousand fathoms of routine. Maybe the problem wasn’t that I drew a submarine; maybe the problem was I’d launched it in the wrong harbor.

    Fine. Next time I’d finish late, or pretend to. I’d ask one question with the tone of a pilgrim seeking wisdom. I’d keep the submarine for after school, where editors at Mad Magazine would understand that sometimes the only way to survive a classroom is to build your own vessel and sail beneath the noise.

    For now, I sat still, practicing the advanced art of “no intention, no movement.” If arrival meant living through this night without losing my sense of humor—or my drawing—I could live with that. Smart over right, sure. But right over silent? Not always. Sometimes you keep the submarine.

  • Discontinued at the Light

    Discontinued at the Light

    At a red light yesterday, ferrying my daughters home from school, my car-spotter’s radar pinged. I scan traffic the way birders scan treelines, always hoping for the rare specimen with that elusive look. Something unusual flashed past—and in a beat I clocked it: a 2023 Nissan Maxima, the model’s final year. A voice in my head muttered, “Discontinued.” The word tolled like a small funeral bell, as if it weren’t about the Nissan at all but about me. You’re nearly sixty-four. You are discontinued.

    I refuse to go out like that. Aging is one thing; embalming yourself in morbid commentary is another. I don’t want to spend the next twenty years muttering “discontinued” at traffic, toast, or mirrors. That’s not wisdom. That’s a tantrum with better vocabulary.

    Let’s call morbidity what it is: the childish whining of a narcissist. Who escapes aging? Only the people who don’t get the privilege. Getting old means you’ve been alive for a long time and you’re still here. The refrain—“Discontinued,” “You’re washed up,” “It’s all over”—isn’t just bleak; it’s lugubrious, a mental ailment missing from the DSM-5-TR. Fine, I’ll name it myself: narcissistic morbidity. You moan about your age until you bore everyone around you, including the poor soul trapped inside your skull. You act like you invented birthdays.

    What makes my case extra ridiculous is that I’m in decent shape. I work out. I eat a high-protein diet. Yes, I’m fifteen pounds over fighting weight, but I don’t look like a cautionary tale. I should be grateful, robust, hearty, glad. And yet the diseased little sportscaster in my cranium keeps calling the game: I’ll be driving my daughters, spot a car out of production, and use it as my cue to point at myself—“Discontinued.”

    If I were a comedian, this would be a layup: a man in his sixties drowning in self-pity, heckled by his own internal voice. There’s material for days. But punchlines only work if you know your heckler’s origin story.

    Here’s the reveal: the voice isn’t new. I’ve had it since childhood, a fog machine that kept me holed up drawing and reading while calamity forecasts scrolled across my mind. “The circus will be closed. A lion will escape. There’ll be a riot. Let’s not go. Don’t worry about me; I’ll entertain myself.” “The ice-cream place won’t have my flavor. Let’s stay home; I’ll eat cereal.” “If I throw a party, no one will come. Cancel my birthday this year—and the years after. Who needs a birthday anyway?”

    My gloomy companion even had a cartoon avatar: Glum, the tiny pessimist from The Adventures of Gulliver, late ’60s. Dressed in green, eternally peckish, and permanently resigned—“It’s hopeless.” “We’ll never make it.” “It’ll never work.” “We’re doomed.” He was my first soulmate: snack-oriented, catastrophe-forward.

    Back then TV specialized in a certain archetype—the Dead Weight Character—the one who drags the mission, sandbags morale, and sabotages the plan by simply existing. Land of the Giants fielded Commander Alexander Fitzhugh, a selfish criminal who once gnawed a giant scientist’s rabbit pellets and urged his tiny crew to feast with him because of “nutrition,” a word he repeated over and over as he consumed rabbit pellets. They saw humiliation; he saw survival. Dead Weight comes in many flavors.

    And then there was the greatest Dead Weight of them all: Dr. Zachary Smith of Lost in Space, immortalized by Jonathan Harris, patron saint of theatrical dread. His alliterative insults aimed at the Robot taught me that language could purr, hiss, and bite. Dr. Smith is, frankly, the reason I went to college and became an English major. If you’re going to sabotage a mission, at least do it with diction.

    So if I must live with an inner prophet of doom, I might as well upgrade his elocution. If the voice insists on heckling—calling me discontinued at stoplights and breakfast tables—then give it rhetorical muscle and meter. Let it speak in crafted sentences, not groans. Aging will still arrive right on schedule, but at least the narration won’t be dead weight.

  • Eternal Embarrassment

    Eternal Embarrassment

    Nietzsche imagined hell as reliving your life on loop—eternal recurrence. A demon forces you to endure every joy and misery again. Let’s revise the experiment: not your whole life, just the embarrassing parts on repeat. Eternal embarrassment. If that isn’t the full biography, it’s certainly old age. You no longer fit the world. Your butt shrinks; belts stop doing their job. Cheeks sag. Your neck goes a little fleshy. Your interior vocal editor—never stellar—finally quits, so you talk more than anyone asked for, mostly about how cold you are and how the TV volume is too low. You’ve slowed down, and the world—amped on Red Bull—won’t wait.

    In two weeks, I broke two Samsung TVs, failed to sync my phone with the new garage-door opener, threw an infantile tantrum, and my wife had to bail me out. She could have gone full prosecution; instead, her annoyance was tempered by pity. She saw me trying—earnest home-improvement flailing—and, when I stumbled, she picked up the pieces. I was left embarrassed and nursing a small crisis of confidence.

    So I went hunting for redemption. My family had been grumbling about dinners. Thursday’s Caesar-with-chicken-skewers had overstayed its welcome; they wanted better lunch ingredients—better bread, meats, cheese, and more interesting condiments. As the designated Saturday Trader Joe’s runner, I sat at my computer, family gathered around, actually listened, and updated the list like I was drafting a treaty.

    Next morning—Saturday—I launched my ritual at Hawthorne and Del Amo, a tradition I’ve upheld with the zeal of a cultist for twenty-two years. Grocery shopping isn’t a chore; it’s a military operation. My $350 haul is executed with Navy SEAL precision. Delays, obstacles, small talk? Enemies of efficiency. Armed with the evolving list, I dart through aisles like I’m on Supermarket Sweep, a stopwatch ticking in my skull. 

    That morning, I stepped out of my gunmetal gray Honda, I caught a reflection in the store window—an angle so unforgiving it announced, We’ve had one too many second helpings. I looked away. Denial is cheaper than therapy. In my mind I’m a sleek, youthful me—190 pounds of toned potential, not the spectacle of a 225-pound man auditioning for the Dad-Bod Calendar.

    Inside, my confidence was restored. The staff knows me; they greet me with the friendly heckling reserved for clockwork regulars. If I show up off-schedule, they act like I’ve survived a plane crash. One cheeky clerk calls me the “Larry Csonka of Trader Joe’s.” I play along: “There’s been a Larry Csonka sighting in aisle five.” The rapport was golden—until The Incident. The shelf was barren of unsweetened soy milk—the only plant milk with actual protein. I spotted Mary, the assistant manager, stocking canned goods. I asked, politely, if there was soy milk in the back. She said she’d check, then resumed stacking cans like bullion. Assuming she’d forgotten, I quietly asked another employee to check. Fatal misstep.

    By the time I looped back with bread and pastries, Mary had stocked the soy milk—and wore a look that said I’d insulted her canned-goods ethics. In that instant, I crossed the border from beloved regular to pushy customer. Two decades of goodwill, spilled across the linoleum for a stupid carton of soy. If I could time-travel, I’d go home and order a case of Edensoy on Amazon. Once, I entered like Larry Csonka at a Super Bowl parade; now I skulked, head low, list clutched like a last shred of dignity.

    Trader Joe’s was supposed to be my safe space, but I botched it—just like the “simple” garage-door purchase. Simple things kept flowering into fiascos. I was busy processing shame and embarrassment when Nietzsche drifted back in: eternal recurrence. Except my condition was worse. Who needs to replay old humiliations when fresh ones keep arriving on the conveyor belt?

  • The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    Most people paddle along. We don’t have all the answers, but we keep the canoe upright. If you’re like me—diagnosed with low-grade depression, dysthymia—you brave forward and maintain emotional homeostasis by doing your duty to yourself, your friends, and your family. You exercise. You eat right. You post milestones on social media and affirm the tribe’s values, harvesting likes like daylight vitamins. You save for a rainy day.

    That’s what I did. So when the garage door opener finally died after twenty-five years, I called the repair company that had been nursing it for a decade and paid a thousand dollars for a replacement. The tech arrived—mid-thirties, dark blue baseball cap, beard, sunglasses—affable and chatty. We covered carne asada tacos, the garage door racket, and daily protein quotas. In under an hour he had the new Genie humming. And yet: the in-house wall button turned into a ghost button (opens nothing, closes nothing); he issued only one new remote, leaving my wife remote-less; and he didn’t sync the unit to the Genie app. “Easy,” he said, packing up. “Just follow the directions.” Then he vaporized.

    For the next two hours, I tried to enter the unit ID and sync via Bluetooth. Problem: the buttons weren’t labeled, the manual’s diagrams didn’t match my unit, and the app’s pictures didn’t match either. I called my neighbor Joe. He said the same company had given him two remotes—minimum. “Did you already pay?” he asked. “Yes.” “You blew it. He should’ve synced your phone before he left. You’ll never see him again.” I protested that he seemed nice. “He’s gone, dude.” Then, after a long pause: “Call and demand they come back—and threaten a bad Yelp review.” I phoned the tech; he said he’d try to fit me in “tomorrow,” which I translated as never. The company promptly sent me a link to post a Google review. I wrote a calm, three-star warning: skilled install, but details ignored; don’t pay until the phone is synced and both remotes are in hand. I pasted the same on Yelp. Not spiteful—just a PSA. And then the shame arrived like a stomach punch. I felt as if I’d betrayed him—though he’d arguably betrayed me. Why was I ashamed? Because I felt stupid for failing at the sync.

    ChatGPT didn’t rescue me, and the failed DIY made me feel worse—ashamed and anxious. Getting the garage fully functional had become a talisman for my emotional homeostasis. Without it, I began to tilt into the abyss. My wife came home from her middle school job; I explained the mess. She said she’d help later—first, a mountain of paperwork. I tried to stay quiet but kept circling back to the tech’s “betrayal.” My posture turned desperate and wounded; the tension thickened. She retreated to the bedroom to grade and watch TV. She wanted nothing to do with me. I don’t blame her. I’d become an emotional siren labeled The Garage Door Incident.

    The next day the tech never called. My wife, apparently an engineer in a former life, pulled off the white plastic cover on the unit, found the Bluetooth button, and synced our phones. She also programmed the second remote I’d bought on Amazon. She fixed everything the tech didn’t. I thanked her. She answered—kindly, but surgical—that I’m like her sixth-graders: no patience; I want the world to stop until my problem is solved. When I spin out like that, she needs distance. I nodded. Fair.

    That was three days ago. Since then, something has shifted. I’ll call it a Balrog Moment: Gandalf and the demon in Moria, the bridge cracking, both plunging into darkness. My shame—for incompetence, impatience, and those two negative reviews—shook my homeostasis. I dropped into a shaft of depression, self-doubt, and nihilism. My paddling rituals—coffee, workouts, piano, posting pungent morsels on social media, even drafting my biting book Speedos at Sunset: How Not to Age Gracefully in Public—suddenly felt flimsy, even ridiculous.

    This morning, staring into that abyss, I decided not to look away. The loss of homeostasis—the Balrog Moment—is the marrow of the book. The pain is vast; it drowns, it devours, it cross-examines everything I am. I’ve been sucked into a vortex of nihilism and self-doubt, and yet here I am, hunting for tools to claw back dignity, rebuild self-confidence, and find alignment in a world that keeps knocking me off center.

  • Out of Alignment

    Out of Alignment

    The following is an expansion from yesterday’s short post about old age into a full-blown chapter:

    No one warned me, but I should have seen it coming: creeping toward your mid-sixties is less a rite of passage than a crisis of competence. Or, to be precise, it’s a progressive misalignment with the modern world. You drop references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, Super Chicken, and All in the Family and watch blank faces stare back at you. You still assume that appliances are built with the sturdiness of yesteryear, only to find that today’s models disintegrate if you breathe on them sideways. This misalignment breeds a special kind of incompetence—egregious, preventable, humiliating.

    You can swallow vats of triglyceride omega-3 fish oil, but the short-term memory still slips away without mercy. You forget where you parked your socks (on the couch), that you meant to watch the final episode of that crime docuseries on Netflix, that a Costco-sized case of 12-gallon trash bags lurks in the garage, or that you already ground tomorrow’s coffee beans. The indignities pile up like unopened mail.

    These lapses, coupled with your fossilized references to extinct foods and beloved TV shows, render you a creature out of phase with the universe—an alien with wrinkles, blinking in confusion, flashing your unearned senior discount at the box office like it’s a badge of relevance.

    You can flex all you want against this verdict. Wolf down 200 grams of protein daily, clang kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the semblance of a beaming bodybuilder who could pass for forty-four instead of sixty-four. But that delusion ends the second you get behind the wheel at night. Your depth perception is a cruel joke. The glare of headlights and streetlamps slices into your worn irises like laser beams, reminding you that biology—not discipline—is running the show.

    Like it or not, you’re aging in real time, a public spectacle of decline, the unwelcome prophet of mortality who shatters the younger generation’s illusion that time is indefinite. To them, you are as pleasant a presence as a neighbor’s dog barking at a squirrel at six a.m.—loud, unnecessary, and impossible to ignore.

    Congratulations–you’ve become the world’s unwanted alarm clock.

    My sense of misalignment with the world—along with the creeping incompetence that tags along with it—hit me square in the jaw in late September 2025, one month shy of my sixty-fourth birthday.

    It happened on a Saturday evening. My wife, a spring chicken at fifty, had night-driving duty, which now includes chauffeuring our teen daughters to and from Knott’s Berry Farm at closing time. She can handle glare and depth perception; my irises, however, are shot, so I stay home.

    Before leaving, she reminded me she’d be back in ninety minutes with not only our daughters but two of their friends, who would pile into the living room for a horror movie called Weapons. My task was humble: BLTs for the horde. She had assembled the sourdough, bibb lettuce, mayonnaise, and beefsteak tomatoes. All I had to do was bake two packages of turkey bacon. I asked when to start. She told me: cook it at five, eat my dinner alone, and she’d prep sandwiches for herself and the kids when they returned. And, since the girls had dibs on the living room, she and I would retreat to the bedroom to watch TV.

    So I dutifully cooked the bacon (in one tray, but we’ll get to that), made myself a sandwich, and felt ridiculously proud. I had suggested adding BLTs to our dinner rotation and here was proof that my idea, embraced by my family, tethered me—however briefly—into alignment with them.

    I capped off the meal with apple slices and mission figs, then decided to test the three-year-old Samsung QLED in our bedroom, which hadn’t been turned on since I’d moved it from the living room. That spot had been usurped by our new LG OLED. The LG was fine, except its remote summoned a ghastly leaf cursor on-screen, forcing you to point and shoot instead of just pressing buttons. A tremor in the hand and you’d select the wrong thing. Still, we had it tuned to Cinema Mode to dodge the dreaded “soap opera effect,” and the LG performed well enough.

    Around six p.m., I plopped on the bed and powered up the Samsung. To my horror, half the screen was draped in black vertical lines, like a digital funeral shroud. The likely culprit? My solo clean-and-jerk onto the dresser—an Olympic lift without chalk, belt, or applause. The impact probably fractured internal circuits invisible to the eye. Or perhaps a ribbon cable had shaken loose from the T-Con board, the kind of thing you might fix if you were comfortable performing micro-surgery with tweezers. I am not. That Samsung was marched to my office and exiled to the growing eWaste Waiting Area, a mausoleum for electronics that had lost their duel with me.

    But I was not done failing. I headed to my daughter’s room for Samsung Number Two—a two-year-old set I’d given her after last week’s reshuffling. The plan: reclaim the Samsung, and saddle her with the eleven-year-old 43-inch LG, which weighs twice as much as the supposedly bigger Samsungs.

    Hubris, however, is a loyal companion. Samsung Number Two sat high on her dresser. I approached like a gorilla in a hurry, arms eagle-spread. My right thumb betrayed me: it pressed into the panel with a sickening crackle, leaving a dent in the digital flesh. In a fit of magical thinking, I told myself, “It probably bounced back.” Reality arrived the moment I powered it on: fresh black lines glared from the wound, precisely where my Hulk thumb had struck.

    Two lessons seared themselves into my brain in those five minutes. First: modern TVs are absurdly fragile, delicate to the point of parody compared to their beefy ancestors. Second: I am unspeakably stupid.

    When my wife came home, the girls claimed the living room. She inspected the bacon and recoiled. “You didn’t spread it out,” she scolded. “You piled it on one tray. You should have used two.”

    “But two trays don’t fit in the toaster oven,” I countered.

    “Use the big oven.”

    “The bacon was fine,” I insisted, noting how transcendent my sandwich had been. She remained unmoved, cooked another batch herself, and then I broke the news about the TVs. She immediately texted her friends, who replied with the rolling-eye emoji. She rarely shares the emojis her friends lob back at my antics, but even she couldn’t suppress this one.

    The next morning, I texted my engineering friend Pedro, who invited me to lug the broken Samsungs to his place. He loaded them into his car and promised to take them to his jobsite’s eWaste disposal. That act of disappearance soothed my wife. For closure, I bought a $300 Roku TV for the bedroom. This time, no clean-and-jerks—just white velvet gloves.

    And no grunting.

    But the adjustments keep coming. I’ve learned not to talk too loudly in the morning while the twins sleep. I remember to rest my thumb on the bathroom lock so the door doesn’t fire off a pistol-crack at 2 a.m. during a bladder run.

    Still, no matter how many tweaks I make, I feel perpetually out of alignment. I am an old car with bald tires: once-grippy treads worn down to slick rubber, skidding across every patch of life. Just as a car with crooked alignment wobbles down the road, tugging against the driver’s will, so too does an old soul with fading memory and fossilized references lurch out of sync with the modern world. Both make unsettling noises, both grind themselves into uneven wear, and both provoke the same grim thought in bystanders: maybe it’s time for a realignment—or at least a new set of wheels.