Cinemorphosis

Tag: travel

  • The Great E-Bike Menace

    The Great E-Bike Menace

    I live in Torrance, where over the past few years I have watched an invasive species establish itself on our streets: the teenage e-bike rider. They dart through traffic at unpredictable speeds, weave between cars as though participating in an unauthorized video game, perform wheelies in busy intersections, blow through stop signs with religious devotion, and occasionally taunt motorists who have the misfortune of sharing the road with them. Most appear blissfully unaware of the danger they create. A smaller but more troubling minority seem fully aware and simply do not care.

    The problem has steadily worsened. A few months ago, during a night of heavy rain, I watched three teenage e-bike riders navigate the intersection of Torrance Boulevard and Anza Avenue. The roads were slick, visibility was poor, and the conditions were dangerous even for experienced drivers. Yet there they were, riding through the storm with the confidence of young people who have not yet learned that physics is undefeated.

    For that reason, I was not surprised to read Salvador Hernandez’s Los Angeles Times article, “California’s New Hell’s Angels: Teens on E-Bikes Cut a Path of Danger.” Hernandez describes much of what residents like me have witnessed firsthand. Among the incidents he recounts is the death of an elderly man who was struck by a fourteen-year-old riding recklessly on an e-bike. The problem has grown serious enough that law enforcement agencies are developing specialized responses. Police departments have begun cracking down on illegally modified e-bikes that exceed state regulations, and in Orange County authorities have created dedicated task forces to pursue dangerous riders.

    Many parents remain unaware that California recognizes three distinct classes of e-bikes.

    Class 1 bikes use pedal assist only and have a maximum speed of twenty miles per hour. They are permitted for riders of all ages and require helmets.

    Class 2 bikes combine pedal assist with a throttle and are also limited to twenty miles per hour. They too are available to riders of all ages and require helmets.

    Class 3 bikes use pedal assist and can reach twenty-eight miles per hour. Riders must be at least sixteen years old and wear helmets.

    All three classes are required to display a visible label identifying their classification, though one suspects that some of today’s young speed merchants regard regulatory labels with roughly the same respect they show stop signs.

    Like many public-safety problems, this one seems destined to become worse before it gets better. Driving in Los Angeles was already a test of patience before the arrival of the e-bike era. The city had long mastered the arts of congestion, stress, discourtesy, and occasional road rage. The addition of e-bikes has introduced a fresh layer of chaos. Every morning when I drive my daughters to school, I encounter a gauntlet of obstacles: teenagers weaving through traffic, ignoring traffic laws, and treating the safety of others as an optional consideration.

    The irony is that e-bikes themselves are not the problem. Used responsibly, they are efficient, economical, and environmentally friendly. The problem is the culture that has developed around them—a culture that often treats traffic laws as suggestions and regards reckless behavior as a form of entertainment.

    Where I live, pulling to the side of the road for emergency vehicles is a routine occurrence. We have both Little Company of Mary and Torrance Memorial nearby, and sirens are part of the local soundtrack. Perhaps the increase in emergency activity has nothing to do with e-bikes. Perhaps it is merely my imagination. But after watching teenagers launch themselves through intersections on machines capable of twenty-eight miles per hour while possessing the judgment of teenagers, I cannot help suspecting that at least some of those sirens are chasing the inevitable consequences of youthful overconfidence meeting the laws of motion.

  • Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Canvas Crashes and a Protein Bar Declares War on My Molar

    Five days ago, an hour before my afternoon class, I performed my sacred office ritual: a Barbell’s Salty Peanut protein bar followed by a red apple. The pairing is non-negotiable. The bar coats my teeth in a fudge-like film; the apple arrives like a janitor, scrubbing the residue with righteous crunch. It’s dental choreography. It works—until it doesn’t.

    Mid-bar, I bit down and hit something that did not belong in the human diet. A crack, a jolt, a flash of pain in my upper left molar that suggested litigation. I spit out the offending bite and there it was: a small, defiant piece of gravel. Not metaphorical gravel. Geological. I briefly entertained the idea of a calcified peanut shell, but no—this was the kind of object that builds driveways, not snacks.

    I discarded the rock, finished the bar like a man negotiating with fate, and approached the apple with the caution of a bomb technician, chewing exclusively on my right side. The tooth protested—sharp when I bit down, sensitive when I dared sip cold sparkling water. I called my dentist. He agreed to see me Monday while my daughters are in for their cleaning, a kind of dental drive-by.

    I told him, only half joking, that if this turns into a root canal, I’ll be leaving the country under an assumed name. My claustrophobia is not a charming quirk; it’s a governing principle. The rubber wedge they use to keep your mouth open transforms my throat into a closed border. When I can’t swallow on command, panic doesn’t knock—it kicks the door in. I am praying for a humble composite fix, something modest and merciful. A root canal would turn me into a beachside exile, scanning the horizon for dental extradition.

    As if one anxiety weren’t enough, two days later my college’s learning system—Canvas—collapsed under a ransomware attack that apparently took down thousands of schools. An hour before class, I discovered my lecture had vanished into the digital abyss. I called my engineering friend Pedro to deliver a live report of my unraveling. I told him I’d have to improvise, which in teaching is another word for “pray for coherence.”

    Then a thought arrived like a small miracle: my lectures are linked to Google Slides. If I could log into my Google account, I could resurrect the class. I told Pedro I’d head to the room early and test the login before the students arrived. I looked down at my desk—keys, empty protein bar wrapper, the usual debris of academic life—but no phone.

    “Where the hell is my phone?” I said.

    “You’re talking to me on it,” Pedro replied.

    We laughed the way men laugh when reality briefly exposes its wiring. For twelve years, Pedro has been my unofficial tech support, but informing me that the phone I was using was in my hand may be his finest work.

    Between the compromised tooth and the compromised Canvas infrastructure, I felt like a man auditioning for a nervous breakdown. Instead, I walked into class and, perversely, had one of the best sessions of the semester. We discussed ultra-processed foods—their design, their addictiveness, the way they quietly rig the game of weight management. Then I offered a heretical counterargument: homemade food can be just as seductive, just as dangerous to restraint.

    To prove the point, I pulled up a photograph from the Los Angeles Times: a $38 basturma brisket sandwich from Yerord Mas, built from Australian wagyu and dusted with cumin, garlic, and chiles. The image did not educate so much as seduce. Within seconds, my students had located the menu and confirmed the price with the forensic zeal of the hungry.

    “We should Uber to Glendale,” I said, “and call it field research.”

    At that point I added, “Some of you are going to complain to the Dean that you enrolled in a critical thinking class and all I do is talk about food.”

    They laughed—real laughter, not the polite classroom version. The room had a charged, fizzy quality, as if the collapse of Canvas had granted us permission to loosen the tie a notch. Chaos had stripped the day down to its essentials: conversation, curiosity, a shared joke.

    I needed that laugh more than I care to admit.

    Now I’m waiting. Will the dentist deliver a quick, civilized repair, or will I be pricing one-way tickets and practicing aliases on a beach somewhere in Mexico, scanning the horizon for a man carrying a drill?

    In the meantime, I chew carefully, avoid gravel, and consider the possibility that the most dangerous part of my day is not the curriculum, but the snack.

  • Cognitive Lag Drift Meets the Frogman’s Calm

    Cognitive Lag Drift Meets the Frogman’s Calm

    Camp Flog Gnaw sounds like the name of an enormous toothy cartoon monster, but it was a weekend-long bacchanal of sound and sweat for my wife and our twin daughters, two days of music and mayhem baked under the unforgiving Los Angeles sun. My wife braved the trip on Friday and came home looking like a survivor of a maritime disaster, muttering that leaving Dodger Stadium traffic was like trying to escape a collapsing pyramid. She begged me to handle Sunday drop-off and assured me they would Uber home like civilized people. Armed with a “Fast Pass” for the 110 North, I engaged Google Maps, which promptly betrayed me and sent me barreling into downtown—an urban obstacle course specifically engineered to destroy men my age. Pedestrians sprang into the street like feral pigeons, daring me to earn a manslaughter charge. Driverless Waymo cars drifted past me with pastel-lit antennae, cheerful like clown hearses guiding me into the underworld. The lanes themselves seemed painted by committee: solid, dashed, turning, not turning, red, green, “maybe stop,” “maybe don’t”—a psychedelic optical exam administered at 20 mph.

    I began to notice a quiet but unsettling shift in my driving. Two hazards arrived at the same time, like conspirators who had compared notes. First, the road itself had changed. It no longer presented information—it assaulted me with it. Screens glowed, dashboards pulsed, alerts chimed, and every passing car seemed to flash some new digital signature. The highway had become a carnival of LEDs.

    Second—and less forgiving—was what was happening inside my own head. My processing speed had slowed just enough to matter. Not dramatically. Not catastrophically. Just enough to turn split-second decisions into small negotiations. And driving is no place for negotiation. The convergence of these two developments created Cognitive Lag Drift: the subtle but consequential slowing of mental processing speed that impairs real-time decision-making in high-stakes environments like driving, where milliseconds matter.

    The result was a kind of sensory overload paired with cognitive lag—a bad marriage. What used to feel like a calm, controlled glide now felt like I was trying to play a video game while someone flicked the lights on and off in rapid succession. The margin for error hadn’t changed. I had.

    Driving was no longer serene. It was a test I hadn’t agreed to take.

    And yet—strangely—on my wrist sat a counterargument. My Casio G-Shock Frogman did not flash, negotiate, or editorialize. It did not offer lane suggestions, heart rate, moral encouragement, or existential commentary. It simply displayed the time in large, unapologetic numerals, like a monk who has taken a vow of clarity. No animations. No alerts. No betrayal. In a world where every screen demands interpretation, the Frogman delivers a verdict: 5:42. That’s it. No subtext, no narrative arc, no committee-painted ambiguity. The road may have turned into a casino of stimuli and my brain into a cautious bureaucrat, but the watch remains a quiet tyrant of precision. I glance down and feel, for a fleeting second, that order is still possible—that somewhere in this strobe-lit madness, truth can be reduced to a number that does not argue back.

    When I finally dropped off my wife and daughters, I whispered a confession to my wife: “I’m done with this. I think I’m giving my Accord to you, and the other car to the girls. I’m retiring from the driving game.” They didn’t laugh; they’ve seen cracks in the armor. I’m a high-strung man, and at sixty-four, the neurons don’t fire like they used to. I can still handle a five-mile radius around my house—my personal demilitarized zone—but pull me into the wilds of Los Angeles traffic and I’m ready to hang up my driver’s jersey. Downtown LA isn’t a city. It’s a gladiatorial arena where the young come to dominate, and I say to myself, “This is no country for old men.”

  • The Frogman and the Sandwich

    The Frogman and the Sandwich

    The Frogman is my aspirational self. He is courageous and disciplined. I am not. I am a coward. My self-recrimination is based on the fact that I allow fear to compromise my morals. For example, I am revolted by the way livestock is abused for our animal consumption so that philosophically I should not eat meat, eggs, or dairy, but I fear that a plant-based diet will not give me optimal nutrition. Nor will it quell my rapacious appetite, so I compromise my morals and “force myself” to eat steak, chicken, eggs, cottage cheese, and Greek yogurt. The Frogman is a man of conviction. He looks at a moral problem square in the face and behaves appropriately. Gluttony is not part of his lifestyle. My soul is tormented by my awareness of the Avatar Conscience Gap: the distance between one’s idealized self—disciplined, principled, unflinching—and one’s actual behavior under pressure. The wider the gap, the louder the internal indictment, as the imagined avatar (in my case, the Frogman) functions as a constant moral comparator. My Frogman sits on my wrist, silent, resin-clad, a metronome of judgment. I measure myself against him and come up short in ways that feel precise, almost clinical. 

    Which brings us to actual clinical measurements.

    My doctor wants bloodwork—the full audit: PSA, lipids, liver function, hemoglobin. A bureaucratic harvest of numbers designed to convert my bloodstream into a spreadsheet. I concede the PSA. The rest feels like theater. At 230 pounds—twenty over my preferred fiction—my numbers will behave, mostly. LDL will be slightly elevated, the biochemical equivalent of a raised eyebrow. Twenty extra pounds leaves fingerprints. It always does.

    At 210, those fingerprints disappear. At 210, my labs don’t just improve—they absolve. At 210, I become the Frogman, at least on paper. A man whose blood tells a cleaner story.

    But I don’t need a blood test to tell me what to do. I need to lose twenty pounds. And I will be told this, formally, in a tone of gentle inevitability. A “plan of action,” as if the problem were logistical rather than existential.

    I cannot promise compliance.

    I eat well. Whole foods. High protein. I abstain from alcohol. I perform all the rituals of discipline. And yet my appetite behaves like an unlicensed contractor—loud, insistent, unconcerned with permits or plans.

    Last night, after dinner, I swore the kitchen closed at six. A solemn vow, made with the confidence of a man who has not yet opened a lunch bag.

    Then I found it: an uneaten turkey and cheese sandwich in my daughter’s bag. Soft bread. Mild cheese. The faint scent of opportunity.

    There was no debate. No internal summit. I ate it immediately, gratefully, with the kind of focus normally reserved for religious experience. It was, without exaggeration, the best moment of my day.

    This is Sandwich Serendipity—the ecstatic discovery of unclaimed food, experienced not as leftovers but as providence. The afflicted man does not assess freshness, provenance, or caloric cost. He does not negotiate with tomorrow’s intentions. He receives the sandwich as a gift from the universe and responds with immediate devotion.

    You can moralize this if you like. I won’t. The joy is too pure.

    But it does raise an inconvenient question: how does a man like this—susceptible to ambush by deli meat and porridge bread—promise a physician that he will lose twenty pounds? On what authority? On which version of himself?

    Because the Frogman would not have eaten that sandwich.

    The Frogman would have zipped the bag, closed the kitchen, and gone to bed with the calm of a man aligned with his values. The Frogman does not forage. He does not improvise. He does not surrender.

    I put the watch on anyway.

    It sits on my wrist like a massive, indestructible accusation—resin, digital, exact. It broadcasts courage. It implies discipline. It suggests a man who has made his decisions and is living inside them.

    And beneath it, quietly, is the truth:

    I am not that man.

    Not yet.

  • Sandwich Serendipity and the Futility of Bloodwork

    Sandwich Serendipity and the Futility of Bloodwork

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

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

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

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

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

  • Exiled from Desert: A Bodybuilder’s Dream of Failure

    Exiled from Desert: A Bodybuilder’s Dream of Failure

    Last night I dreamed I lived in a place so stripped of imagination it had the confidence to call itself Desert, Arizona—as if the planners had looked at a map, shrugged, and said, “Why embellish? We’re in the desert. That’s our name.”

    In Desert, I was a bodybuilder. Not one of the marble statues you see in magazines, but a working stiff with a barbell and delusions of parity. My friends—my friends, I thought—were Serge Nubret and Robbie Robinson in their prime. Thirty years old, luminous, carved out of some superior mineral. We spent our afternoons at a man-made lake, discussing training splits, protein intake, and the eternal question of carbs—as if the fate of civilization hinged on oatmeal versus steak.

    For a while, I forgot who they were. That was the charm. They were just Serge and Robbie—men with opinions, not monuments with lats.

    Then I made the mistake that ruins most good things: I noticed the hierarchy. They were far beyond me in achievement. 

    One afternoon, the thought hit me with the force of a missed squat: I told them I didn’t belong. These were titans. I was a reasonably assembled civilian. I said as much—praised their greatness, confessed my inadequacy, pledged to work ten times harder to catch up.

    And just like that, the air changed.

    They didn’t argue. They didn’t correct me. They simply withdrew, as if I had violated an unspoken clause in the friendship agreement: Do not turn us into symbols. The moment I stopped seeing them as people and started seeing them as achievements, the spell broke. They eased me out of the circle with the quiet efficiency of men accustomed to dropping dead weight.

    A replacement arrived with the punctuality of a cautionary tale: a young Englishman in his early twenties, newly employed as a high school teacher, brimming with the kind of metabolic optimism that borders on arrogance. He made gains at a rate that suggested divine favoritism. Within weeks, he surpassed me. Within days of that, he lost interest in me. He graduated upward—into the company of Serge and Robbie—leaving me where all the surpassed are left: behind, holding yesterday’s program.

    That’s when I knew I had to leave Desert.

    My in-laws were waiting to drive me to Prescott Valley, a destination that sounded like a compromise. Before the journey, we stopped at an overnight smoothie station—an oasis for the nutritionally anxious. Imagine a row of blenders stretching into the horizon, bins of organic ingredients arranged like offerings, and travelers preparing their liquid penance before braving the heat.

    I approached the blender with the confidence of a man who has learned nothing.

    I added fruit. Then vegetables. Then protein powder. Then more of everything, because moderation is for people who have already succeeded. The machine whirred, strained, and then produced something biblical: a green, algae-like tendril that rose from the blender and clawed at the ceiling, as if trying to escape my dietary philosophy.

    The proprietor—a matronly woman in an apron who had seen too many men confuse excess with virtue—fixed me with a look that could curdle whey. “You overloaded it,” she said, with the calm authority of someone accustomed to cleaning up after ambition.

    Nearby, bodybuilder and YouTuber Greg Doucette produced a perfect smoothie with surgical precision and regarded me the way a pilot regards turbulence: an inconvenience best ignored. His competence was an indictment.

    We got in the car.

    As we drove away from Desert, the realization settled in: this wasn’t a relocation. It was a retreat. I had committed the small, accumulating sins of a man who wants the result without fully respecting the method. I ate buckwheat groats when I should have eaten steak and eggs. I entertained carbs with a softness bordering on affection. I mistook enthusiasm for discipline and variety for virtue.

    But the deeper failure wasn’t nutritional. It was philosophical. I had tried to stand among the great by admiring them as great, which is the surest way to exile yourself. I had reduced people to their achievements, and in doing so, reduced myself to a spectator.

    In Desert, that’s a disqualifying offense.

    And so I left, not because I was banished, but because I finally understood the terms of my own eviction: in a city that rewards precision, I had been imprecise—in diet, in discipline, and worst of all, in how I saw other people.

  • Your Electric Tea Kettle Isn’t Broken–Your Circuit Is Maxed Out

    Your Electric Tea Kettle Isn’t Broken–Your Circuit Is Maxed Out

    For three years, my kitchen and I lived in quiet harmony. The outlets behaved. The appliances coexisted. The breaker, that silent arbiter of domestic peace, stayed in its lane.

    Then the electric tea kettle staged a coup.

    It began innocently enough. I’d flip the switch to boil water—an act so mundane it barely registers as effort—and suddenly half the kitchen would go dark. The microwave surrendered. The toaster went mute. The refrigerator went dark. The breaker, like a bouncer tired of excuses, shut everything down with a single decisive click.

    At first, I suspected treachery in the wiring. Then I wondered if the breaker had grown old and irritable. But the evidence pointed, with increasing clarity, to the most polite appliance on the counter: the electric kettle.

    When I removed the kettle from the equation, the kitchen returned to its former civility. No trips. No outages. No drama. The tyrant had been identified.

    Here’s what I learned, and what most people don’t realize:

    An electric kettle is one of the most power-hungry appliances in your kitchen.

    As your electric kettle ages, its heating element becomes less efficient and it draws more amperage than it did originally. 

    I live in an old house that probably has a 15-amp circuit. My house needs an upgrade that includes dedicated 20-amp kitchen lines. 

    Most electric kettles draw around 1500 watts. On a standard 120-volt circuit, that’s roughly 12 to 13 amps—nearly the entire capacity of a typical 15-amp circuit.

    In other words, when you turn on an electric kettle, you’re not adding a polite guest to the party. You’re inviting a heavyweight who immediately eats most of the food and demands the stereo.

    For years, my kitchen tolerated the kettle. Then, seemingly overnight, it didn’t. Nothing dramatic changed. No sparks, no smoke, no cinematic failure.

    What changed was margin.

    Circuits don’t fail like lightbulbs. They drift. A little more load here. A little more resistance there. Maybe the kettle’s heating element aged and became less efficient, drawing slightly more current. Maybe I added a device or two without noticing. Maybe the breaker itself became more sensitive after years of heat cycles.

    Individually, these are minor shifts. Together, they push the system past its limit.

    Before:

    The circuit was operating just under capacity.

    Now:

    The kettle pushed it just over.

    And breakers don’t negotiate. They enforce.

    At this point, a reasonable person might reach for a surge protector. That would be a mistake.

    Surge protectors guard against voltage spikes—lightning, grid fluctuations, the occasional electrical tantrum. They do not increase how much power a circuit can handle.

    Plugging a kettle into a surge protector is like giving a sumo wrestler a nicer chair. It doesn’t make him lighter.

    My solution, for now, is a stovetop kettle.

    It feels like a step backward, but it’s actually a step sideways. The load shifts away from a single electrical circuit and spreads out through the stove. No breaker trips. No negotiations with the grid. Just water, heat, and a whistle that doesn’t require a reset button.

    There’s even a strange side benefit: boiling water now takes a minute of attention. You wait. You listen. The process regains a small measure of dignity.

    This summer when my electrician friend visits from Dallas, I’ll upgrade the kitchen circuits. Modern kitchens are built for modern demands—multiple 20-amp lines, distributed loads, appliances that can coexist without staging a power struggle.

    In other words:

    I’m not fixing the kettle. I’m upgrading the system that failed to contain it.

    If your breaker trips when you use an electric kettle, the problem is probably not mysterious, and it’s probably not dangerous—assuming the breaker is doing its job.

    It’s arithmetic.

    • Electric kettle: ~1500 watts
    • Circuit capacity: limited
    • Other appliances: already drawing power

    Add them together, and something has to give.

    We like to think our homes are stable, predictable systems. But they’re more like negotiations—between demand and capacity, convenience and constraint.

    My kettle didn’t break my kitchen. It revealed it.

  • The Night the Mechanical Diver Stayed Home

    The Night the Mechanical Diver Stayed Home

    Last night I escorted my family and in-laws to a breezy bistro in Redondo Beach, the kind of place where the ocean air does half the marketing. We sat on the patio while a two-man cover band—guitar and bass, faces cured by sun and time—worked their way through the canon: Gordon Lightfoot, Jim Croce, James Taylor. Their voices had the texture of driftwood. The songs arrived like postcards from a quieter century.

    For twenty years, a restaurant meant ceremony. I would strap on an expensive mechanical diver—the horological equivalent of cufflinks—and let it glint under low lighting as if I were auditioning for a role called “Man of Taste.” Five weeks ago, that instinct died without a funeral. In its place: a $110 Casio G-Shock GW-7900. No romance, no pretense, just a blunt instrument that tells time with the indifference of a wall clock. I wore it and felt, not diminished, but strangely settled. Our server had on a Casio Pro Trek. We exchanged a nod—the quiet recognition of two men who had defected from the same aesthetic regime.

    Two weeks ago, I sold off a pair of mechanical divers. The absence registered as silence, not loss. Five weeks ago, I bought my first Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shock—a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000. It feels like I’ve owned it for a decade. Time has warped, stretched, lost its usual proportions. My working theory is this: when an obsession mutates—when it takes a hard, unexpected turn—the brain lingers over the wreckage and the new terrain at once. Every moment gets over-processed, as if your mind is trying to reconcile two incompatible identities. The result is temporal inflation. Five weeks feel like ten years. Meanwhile, the watches I once coveted sit in their box like artifacts from a civilization I can’t quite remember belonging to.

    I’ve made a few videos documenting this conversion. To my mild alarm, a handful of people have followed suit—buying the GW-7900, aiming their watches toward the Fort Collins signal tower like amateur astronomers chasing a frequency instead of a star. It’s absurd, and yet there it is: evidence that I may have drifted, however briefly, into the low orbit of influence. Not authority. Not expertise. Influence—the most accidental and least deserved of modern currencies.

    The question now hovers: is this a phase or a verdict? Will some future mood—call it nostalgia, call it vanity—dust me with longing and send me back to my mechanical divers? Or have I crossed a line I can’t uncross, sealed inside a G-Shock logic that values precision over poetry? I don’t know. The future, like the tide, refuses to take requests.

    What I do know is this: today I’ll need to punish myself with extra work in the garage gym. Last night I demolished a crispy chicken sandwich on brioche while listening to “If You Could Read My Mind,” and the song’s quiet sorrow did nothing to slow me down. If anything, it provided a soundtrack for excess—the softest possible music for a thoroughly unrestrained appetite.

  • The Acrobats I Misjudged

    The Acrobats I Misjudged

    Sometime around 2018, I’d make the daily trek from the tennis courts to my office and pass the library lawn—a patch of campus that should have offered a quiet, pastoral glide into the workday. Instead, it hosted a recurring spectacle: half a dozen young men staging what can only be described as a low-budget Cirque du Campus. Shirtless or half-shirted, draped in genie pants or frayed denim cut-offs, they performed for an audience that did not exist. Their language was pure motion—flips that flirted with kung fu, kicks that negotiated with gravity, juggling routines that collapsed into chaos, and the occasional hacky sack circle, that ancient ritual of collegiate aimlessness.

    They were hungry—visibly, almost heroically so—for attention. Unfortunately, they possessed more appetite than assets. The enthusiasm was volcanic; the talent, less so. Their charm came in bursts, like a faulty engine. I found them unbearable. My morning walk, once a minor pastoral pleasure, was now hijacked by these blustering soltimbancos—performers without a stage, noise without necessity. I dismissed them with the easy confidence of a man certain he had outgrown foolishness.

    Today, I walked past that same lawn. Empty. Sunlit. Silent. The performance had ended without ceremony, as all such performances do. And I caught myself wondering—not with irritation, but with a strange, reluctant tenderness—what became of those boys.

    Because here is the inconvenient truth: youth is not a time for dignity. It is a sanctioned season of excess—of overreach, bad judgment, inflated self-regard, and public experiments in identity that collapse under their own absurdity. We try on personas the way they tried on those ridiculous pants: boldly, badly, and without permission. We embarrass ourselves in broad daylight and only later, with the benefit of distance, call it “growth.”

    So what changed? Not them. Me.

    Time performs a quiet surgery on the ego. It dulls the impulse to sneer and replaces it with something more complicated—recognition, perhaps, or even a flicker of respect. Those young men were not interrupting my peace; they were spending a currency I no longer possessed: the freedom to look ridiculous without apology.

    And so, to those lawn acrobats—wherever you’ve landed, whatever respectable disguises you now wear—I offer this: I hope life has been kind to you. I hope you found your footing, literal and otherwise.

    But for the sake of civilization, I must insist on one thing.

    Put a shirt on.

  • The Man Who Collected Timepieces and Ignored Time

    The Man Who Collected Timepieces and Ignored Time

    For more than twenty years, I lived inside the watch hobby like a man living inside a museum—reverent, obsessive, and curiously uninterested in the exhibits’ stated purpose. I rotated Seiko divers, admired their dials like stained glass, felt their rotors hum like distant machinery—and barely cared what time it was. That’s the joke with teeth: the one function watches exist to perform was never the center of my fixation. I wasn’t tracking time. I was courting it. Romance, nostalgia, the giddy satisfaction of gears responding to my wrist’s movement—those were my currencies. Timekeeping was just the pretext.

    G-Shock, in that world, was vulgar. Too digital. Too close to the smartwatch species I distrust—the glowing, needy devices that feel less like tools and more like supervisors. A G-Shock belonged on a mannequin posed mid-adventure, not on a human being trying to convince himself he possessed taste.

    And yet, sometime around 2010, the Frogman GWF-1000 slipped past my defenses. That asymmetrical case had a crooked charisma, like a boxer with a broken nose who still wins fights. I’d think about it, then shut it down with the usual litany: plastic, digital, not my tribe. I repeated those lines for years, the way a man repeats vows he secretly hopes to break.

    About a month ago, something in me stopped negotiating. The impulse didn’t arrive politely; it landed like a fever. I ordered the Frogman from Japan and watched it crawl through customs as if it were being interrogated for treason. Three weeks later, it showed up. I strapped it on.

    And there it was—presence. Not the polished, self-conscious presence of a luxury diver, but a blunt, physical authority. It didn’t ask for admiration. It assumed compliance.

    Then came the real disruption: Tough Solar and Multiband-6. Set it and forget it—except you don’t forget it, because it quietly corrects you. The watch syncs itself to atomic time, and suddenly you are no longer negotiating with approximation. You are pinned to reality. No drift, no romance, no mechanical shrug. Just accuracy, arriving nightly like a silent auditor.

    I didn’t expect the psychological effect. Being anchored to exact time produced a strange calm, the way a well-balanced diet makes you realize how erratic you’ve been eating. My mechanical divers—beautiful, expensive, lovingly chosen—never gave me that. They gave me narrative. The Frogman gave me certainty.

    The numbers didn’t help the old regime either. Five hundred dollars for the Frogman. A little over a hundred for the GW-7900 Rescue. Both delivered the same atomic truth. Meanwhile, my divers sat there—two, three times the price—offering charm, yes, but also drift, maintenance, and the faint suspicion that I’d been paying for the idea of precision rather than precision itself.

    Before I start sounding like a late-night infomercial for resin and radio signals, I need to detour—briefly, and deliberately—to a song that used to haunt my teenage gym sessions: “You Light Up My Life” by Debby Boone. It would float through the speakers while I benched and curled, all syrup and sentiment, and it filled me with such irritation that I lifted harder just to drown it out. The song wasn’t just bad; it was suffocating in its insistence on emotional purity.

    This matters because the watch hobby is full of that same conversion energy. The language of revelation. The before-and-after testimony. And men, in particular, are suckers for it.

    We don’t adopt hobbies; we convert to them. We don’t adjust our diets; we declare them. We don’t experiment; we renounce and rebuild. One week it’s mechanical purity, the next it’s quartz precision, then solar enlightenment. Each shift arrives with the force of a Damascus-road epiphany, complete with blind spots and overconfidence.

    I know this pattern because I’ve lived it—in watches, in fitness, in every arena where identity can be strapped on, laced up, or swallowed. Men love absolutes. We love the feeling of total overhaul. We love the idea of the metamorphosis so much we may have a figurine on our desk: Thing or Megatron–icons of brute conversion. We mistake intensity for clarity and call it transformation.

    So when I talk about G-Shock, I have to keep one hand on the brake. Because “being anchored to Real Time” has the flavor of conversion, and conversion is intoxicating. It makes you want to declare the past obsolete and the present definitive. It turns a purchase into a philosophy.

    And yet—facts remain stubborn. I’m typing this wearing the GW-7900 Rescue. Tomorrow will be the Frogman. The next day, back to the Rescue. The mechanicals sit in their box a few feet away, arranged with care, untouched—like last year’s tax documents: important, preserved, and no longer consulted.

    That doesn’t make G-Shock a religion. It makes it a correction. Whether I treat it as one or the other will determine whether this is clarity—or just another episode in a long history of well-dressed delusion.