Cinemorphosis

Tag: travel

  • The Rearview Great White

    The Rearview Great White

    This morning I drove my daughter and her friend from Torrance to Knott’s Berry Farm, a forty-minute journey that included the usual Southern California ritual of surrendering a portion of one’s life to the freeway.

    On the 91 East, I settled into the diamond lane and soon acquired a companion: a pearl-white Toyota Grand Highlander attached to my rear bumper.

    He stayed there for roughly twelve miles.

    I wasn’t crawling. The driver simply wanted to go faster, and apparently the laws of physics required that he communicate this desire by positioning several thousand pounds of Toyota close enough to inspect the stitching on my back seat.

    About five miles before the Beach Boulevard exit, traffic began slowing. I soon saw why. Two lanes to my right was a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

    Everyone underwent the customary freeway conversion.

    Brake lights appeared.

    Speedometers suddenly became objects of intense scholarly interest.

    Drivers who had been doing eighty-five seconds earlier discovered within themselves a deep and previously unsuspected commitment to public safety.

    The Grand Highlander, however, had apparently missed the announcement.

    He illegally crossed out of the diamond lane, accelerated past me, and continued charging ahead.

    I watched with fascination.

    Surely he’ll see the CHP.

    He didn’t.

    Surely he’ll slow down.

    He didn’t.

    Then he passed the patrol car.

    The CHP officer noticed him immediately.

    The cruiser pulled out.

    It moved behind the Highlander.

    And at that moment, the entire psychological structure of the freeway changed.

    The Highlander hit the brakes.

    Too late.

    The lights came on.

    This is what I call The Rearview Great White: that primitive surge of terror you experience when a police cruiser appears behind you with its lights flashing and you realize, after several desperate seconds of denial, that you are the intended meal.

    There is always that brief period of bargaining.

    Maybe he’s after somebody else.

    You change lanes.

    He changes lanes.

    Maybe he needs me to move aside.

    You move farther right.

    He follows.

    The fin is circling.

    Imagine swimming a hundred yards offshore at Redondo Beach and seeing the dorsal fin of a great white shark rise from the water behind you.

    That’s close enough.

    The Highlander driver, who moments earlier had been exercising dominion over the 91 Freeway, was now prey.

    I expected to feel some schadenfreude.

    I didn’t.

    Partly because I’ve driven more aggressively than I should have myself. Moral superiority becomes difficult when the prosecution has access to your own driving record.

    More importantly, I didn’t think his behavior quite deserved the emotional death penalty.

    On my personal Aggression Scale, I’d give him a six.

    Annoying? Absolutely.

    Reckless? Certainly.

    But I’ve seen eights and nines—the true freeway psychopaths who cross four lanes at ninety miles an hour as though auditioning for a role in Grand Theft Auto: Gardena.

    Had the Highlander been an eight, I might have enjoyed watching the CHP cruiser descend upon him like divine judgment.

    At six, I mostly felt sorry for him.

    I told my passengers that the poor guy was probably hyperventilating.

    Because seeing the lights is only the beginning.

    Now you have to pull over.

    This sounds easy until your nervous system has reverted to that of a gazelle being pursued across the Serengeti. You must find a safe location, activate the turn signal, change lanes, slow down, and demonstrate to the officer that you’re a stable citizen rather than someone about to flee the country.

    Then comes the roadside personality transformation.

    The aggressive driver disappears.

    The tailgater disappears.

    The man who fifteen seconds earlier regarded traffic laws as suggestions issued by lesser men is gone.

    In his place appears the most agreeable citizen in California.

    “Yes, Officer.”

    “Absolutely, Officer.”

    “Of course, Officer.”

    Meanwhile, his shirt is soaked through. His back is glued to the seat. His heart is trying to escape through his sternum.

    The Highlander followed the CHP cruiser down the offramp toward Knott’s Berry Farm, and I continued on my way.

    No triumph.

    No fist pump.

    Just sympathy for a man who had spent twelve miles imagining himself the predator.

    Then he looked in his rearview mirror.

    And saw the fin.

  • Breakfast Eschatology

    Breakfast Eschatology

    I no longer want to resolve my eschatological crisis.

    I don’t want to determine the nature of substitutionary atonement, theodicy, and eternity. I don’t want to debate whether hell is eternal, corrective, metaphorical, mistranslated, or the unfortunate product of several centuries of theologians getting overexcited. I’m tired of sifting through my epistemic crisis as though somewhere beneath a pile of Greek nouns I will finally uncover the laminated instruction sheet for the universe.

    I’ve also given up on perfection, physical, spiritual, and otherwise.

    What I really want is a good breakfast.

    Not breakfast at home. Home breakfast has its virtues, but it is essentially maintenance. Oatmeal. Yogurt. Berries. Protein. The nutritional equivalent of changing the oil.

    I want to go to a café.

    A good one.

    I want banana-nut French toast, buttermilk pancakes, poblano eggs Benedict, crisp potatoes, and a waitress approaching with a coffee pot before I’ve even noticed that my cup is half empty.

    More importantly, I want people. Lots of them.

    A true breakfast is communal. Certain movies become better when watched in a packed theater, where laughter moves through the audience like electricity. Breakfast works the same way.

    The lonely café is hell on earth.

    Three customers scattered across twenty empty tables. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. A laminated menu curling at the corners. Somewhere in the kitchen, a microwave beeps with the melancholy finality of a hospital monitor.

    Technically, breakfast is being served.

    Spiritually, the place is already closed.

    The packed café is another universe.

    You open the door and hear the glorious racket of human appetite. Forks strike plates. Coffee cups land on saucers. Children negotiate syrup distribution. Servers weave between tables carrying platters of eggs and potatoes. The room smells of coffee, butter, toasted bread, maple syrup, and potatoes surrendering magnificently to the griddle.

    Every table is occupied.

    A line waits outside.

    This is not merely a restaurant.

    This is evidence.

    I call it Breakfast Eschatology: the abandonment of speculation about ultimate salvation in favor of recognizing modest intimations of heaven in the communal celebration of a magnificent breakfast.

    For years, I have worried about the Last Things.

    What happens after death?

    What is the nature of original sin?

    What are the rigors of postmortem salvation? 

    What did the Greek word aiōnios mean before two thousand years of theology climbed onto its back?

    At some point, the soul develops theological indigestion.

    Enough.

    Bring me the poblano eggs Benedict.

  • The Sandwich Test

    The Sandwich Test

    Late in my sixty-fourth year, I had a dream about getting old.

    Not dying. Not disease. Not falling down the stairs and being discovered three days later by a concerned Amazon driver. The dream was about something that frightens me more: remaining perfectly alive while becoming increasingly incompatible with the world.

    I was still a college writing professor, but the college had metastasized into an enormous city. I had offices scattered across campus, although “office” was a generous term. Some of my offices were hidden inside caves. Others were buried beneath rocks. Apparently, I had been teaching composition continuously through the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic eras.

    I was no longer Professor McMahon.

    I was Ancient Man.

    Students and faculty tolerated me with the peculiar tenderness people reserve for very old dogs and malfunctioning appliances they don’t quite have the heart to throw away. I was still technically employed. I still had classes to teach. I simply never made it to them.

    I was too busy looking for lunch.

    Eventually I wandered into a campus café and ordered a sandwich. Then came the moment that crystallized the entire dream.

    I didn’t know how to pay.

    Everyone else apparently understood the electronic payment system. There were screens, phones, apps, codes, invisible financial transmissions humming through the atmosphere. I stood before the cashier with the helpless expression of a Cro-Magnon man encountering an Apple Store.

    Finally, I opened my wallet.

    Inside, instead of dollar bills, was a wad of turkey cold cuts.

    This was my money.

    I handed the cashier several slices.

    She stared at them.

    Then she stared at me.

    For a moment, I could see her weighing her options: call security, summon a social worker, or simply accept that the ancient professor had reached the stage of life when deli meat constituted legal tender.

    She chose mercy.

    Suppressing her laughter, she accepted my turkey and made me a sandwich while her coworkers turned away so I wouldn’t see them shaking.

    This was The Sandwich Test: the moment when an ordinary transaction reveals that the world has quietly changed its operating system without consulting you.

    Every generation eventually takes it.

    One day you are a fully competent adult who understands how civilization works. Then you encounter a parking meter, QR code, authentication app, digital wallet, restaurant kiosk, or some other technological improvement designed to make life “easier,” and discover that apparently everyone received instructions except you.

    The young person behind the counter looks at you sympathetically.

    You reach for your wallet.

    Turkey.

    The humiliation goes deeper than technological incompetence. The Sandwich Test tells you that your currency—literal and metaphorical—is losing value.

    I had survived chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, online teaching, Canvas, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. This longevity gave me a certain prestige. People regarded me as one might regard a giant sequoia: ancient, impressive, and probably best left exactly where he is.

    At one point I encountered Florida A&M’s magnificent Marching 100 moving across campus. I followed them.

    Their music filled me with heavenly bliss. I wasn’t supposed to interfere with their rehearsal, but nobody threw me out. Ancient Man had privileges. If an elderly professor who had apparently been teaching since the Paleozoic wanted to trail behind the marching band, you let him.

    This was the contradiction of old age. I was ridiculous but venerable, obsolete but durable, invisible but somehow legendary. People humored me precisely because I had survived long enough to become an artifact.

    Yet I didn’t feel honored.

    I felt lonely.

    I thought of the larval souls of Hades, those spectral inhabitants of the underworld who retained consciousness without fully participating in life. That was the real terror of the dream: not that my body had failed but that the world had moved several feet away from me. I could still see it, hear it, walk through it.

    I just couldn’t quite enter it.

    Then I woke up.

    My muscles were sore from the previous day’s kettlebell workout. I lay there contemplating Ancient Man, wandering through geological time with his useless wallet stuffed with lunch meat.

    Then I got out of bed and headed for the exercise bike.

    The larval state could wait another day.

  • Snackrilege

    Snackrilege

    Introduced by Kellogg’s in 1968, Danish Go-Rounds occupied a category all their own. Imagine Pop-Tarts after several years studying pastry in Paris. Their flaky crust gave way to spirals of buttery dough wrapped around cinnamon and brown sugar with a generosity that suggested someone in the Kellogg’s test kitchen still believed breakfast deserved dignity.

    Then, sometime in the mid-1970s, they vanished.

    Kellogg’s discontinued Danish Go-Rounds while allowing Pop-Tarts to inherit the earth.

    I have never recovered.

    Pop-Tarts always struck me as breakfast designed by an engineering committee. They possessed all the emotional warmth of corrugated cardboard lightly dusted with cinnamon. They were perfectly adequate, which is often the first warning sign that something wonderful has been sacrificed in the name of efficiency.

    The disappearance of Danish Go-Rounds taught me an early lesson about consumer culture. Companies rarely announce that they are replacing excellence with mediocrity. They simply assure you that “customers prefer the new product,” as though an anonymous focus group had voted to replace Mozart with elevator music.

    Perhaps they did.

    As a child, however, I interpreted the loss with the disproportionate seriousness children reserve for the destruction of sacred things. A glorious breakfast civilization had collapsed. The pastry aristocracy had been guillotined, leaving only processed commoners to occupy the throne.

    Looking back, I realize Danish Go-Rounds became more than breakfast.

    They became a symbol.

    Their disappearance seemed to foreshadow a broader cultural transition, one in which craftsmanship quietly yielded to optimization, distinction surrendered to standardization, and memorable pleasures were gradually replaced by products that offended no one because they inspired no one. Before long came a parade of aggressively modern food innovations: Imperial Margarine, Tang, Space Food Sticks, Boone’s Farm Apple Wine, SlimFast, and enough chemically enhanced convenience foods to make future nutritionists wonder whether the twentieth century had briefly declared war on its own digestive system.

    Of course, this is nostalgia talking.

    The 1970s produced plenty of culinary atrocities alongside their occasional masterpieces. Memory edits generously. It preserves the triumphs and quietly escorts the embarrassments out the back door.

    Still, I cannot think about Danish Go-Rounds without arriving at what I now call Snackrilege.

    Snackrilege is the profanation of a beloved food through its discontinuation, reformulation, or replacement with an inferior mass-market substitute, producing the irrational conviction that civilization itself has taken a wrong turn.

    Snackrilege is not ordinary disappointment.

    It is culinary apostasy.

    It is watching a corporation demolish a cathedral and replace it with a parking garage while issuing a cheerful press release explaining that parking is more convenient for everyone.

    The object itself hardly matters. One person’s Danish Go-Rounds are another person’s original Butterfinger, Jell-O 1-2-3, Marathon Bar, or McDonald’s fried apple pie. Every generation possesses its own edible relics, foods whose disappearance feels strangely personal because they were quietly woven into the emotional architecture of childhood.

    That is why Snackrilege has so little to do with pastries.

    What we mourn is not merely the loss of a favorite flavor but the disappearance of a small piece of the world that first taught us comfort, delight, and the reassuring illusion that the best things would always be there waiting for us.

    Then one day they aren’t.

    And someone hands us a Pop-Tart with a perfectly straight face.

  • The Bad Apple Principle

    The Bad Apple Principle

    This morning, while swinging kettlebells in my garage, I listened to Larry Mantle’s AirTalk. The topic was dogs in restaurants, or more precisely, the small but talented minority of dog owners determined to convince the rest of us that civilization has been overrated.

    The complaints were familiar. Dogs licked strangers’ hands. Seemingly placid dogs lunged at smaller ones. Playful dogs darted under servers carrying trays of hot food. Then came the owners of “service dogs” who informed restaurant staff that the rules were for lesser mortals. Their pets, like minor royalty, possessed diplomatic immunity.

    I suspect more than ninety percent of dog owners are perfectly considerate. They keep their dogs under control, respect boundaries, and would never dream of turning a restaurant into an off-leash park.

    They are also irrelevant.

    Restaurants don’t write policies for them.

    They write policies for the other ten percent.

    That observation led me to a melancholy truth about institutions. Bureaucracies are not designed around our best behavior or even our typical behavior. They are designed around our worst behavior. They must assume that somewhere, someone will abuse every privilege, exploit every loophole, and confuse entitlement with freedom.

    That is The Bad Apple Principle: the misconduct of a small minority determines the restrictions imposed upon the responsible majority.

    The principle explains far more than dogs in restaurants. It explains airport security, locked toothpaste at CVS, liability waivers, plagiarism software, surveillance cameras, password requirements, and a thousand other bureaucratic irritations. Every rule we grumble about has a backstory, and that backstory almost always begins with someone who behaved just badly enough to make the rule inevitable.

    The idea reminded me of a book I devoured when I was ten: Laurence J. Peter’s The Peter Principle. Ever since, I’ve had a weakness for elegant ideas distilled into memorable names.

    Naturally, I immediately imagined writing my own bestseller:

    The Bad Apple Principle: Why Good People Live by Bad People’s Rules.

    Then reality intruded.

    The entire thesis fits comfortably inside a single paragraph.

    Knowing the publishing industry, however, I’m sure a seasoned nonfiction writer could stretch it into fifteen brisk chapters, three airport interviews, a TED Talk, and a podcast tour. My contribution would simply be to wave wistfully from the sidelines, muttering, “Yes, but the title was mine.”

  • Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    We spent a few days in Carlsbad at the Hotel Solea. Aside from the sublime crepes at The French Corner and the infectious energy of surfers drifting through town with boards tucked under their arms, the place left me strangely cold. Carlsbad struck me as polished to the point of sterility, a resort town forever orbiting the gravitational pull of Legoland. Everywhere you looked, there were souvenir shops, family vacation logistics, and the unmistakable soundtrack of overtired toddlers conducting negotiations at full volume. The town seemed suspended in a permanent state of cheerful tourism.

    Then, on the drive home, we traveled fifteen minutes north on Interstate 5 and discovered Oceanside.

    The difference was immediate.

    Instead of curated resort charm, Oceanside possessed the rough confidence of a town that exists for the people who actually live there. We wandered into The Beach Break Cafe, tucked beside a residential neighborhood, where every table seemed occupied by people who looked genuinely happy to be exactly where they were. Nothing about the place felt manufactured. There was no Instagram choreography, no designer rusticity, no desperate attempt to convince diners they were enjoying an “authentic experience.” It simply was authentic.

    More importantly, they don’t phone in breakfast.

    They treat eggs, pancakes, and French toast with the seriousness of a Michelin chef preparing foie gras. The omelets were generously stuffed without collapsing into greasy excess. The French toast achieved that elusive balance of crisp edges and custardy center. The whole-grain banana pancakes possessed a nutty richness that made them taste less like indulgence than craftsmanship.

    The manager—a fit man in his thirties with a neatly trimmed beard and a weathered gray baseball cap—told me he had taken over the restaurant from his father. Born and raised in Oceanside, he spoke about the community with the quiet pride of someone who had no desire to escape it. He mentioned that elite fighters from Camp Pendleton regularly come in for breakfast. After one bite, I understood why. If your profession involves throwing another human being across a room, this is precisely where you’d replenish your glycogen stores.

    That conversation crystallized the difference between the two towns.

    Carlsbad feels like milquetoast chic: affluent, immaculate, and carefully curated for visitors. Oceanside has working-class muscle. It doesn’t seem interested in impressing you. It simply gets on with the business of living. There is an honesty to that kind of place, a confidence that doesn’t require branding consultants or lifestyle influencers to validate it.

    Fifteen minutes separate Carlsbad from Oceanside.

    Culturally, they feel like different countries.

    I’ll take Oceanside.

  • Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    One morning I sat at the piano while my wife prepared her breakfast—a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stovetop. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was four years old again, carried backward in time to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

    Perhaps our religious impulse is nothing more—and nothing less—than that incurable longing to return there.

  • My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    You insist on living near the ocean, but not because you have any romantic desire to surf, bodyboard, or frolic in the waves like a sunscreen commercial. The beach serves a higher purpose. It calms you simply by existing. You need to smell the salt air, hear the muffled percussion of the surf, and watch the horizon dissolve into infinity. What you do not need is to step into the Pacific’s suspicious broth of runoff, seaweed, sunscreen residue, and whatever else civilization has politely donated to the tides. Nor do you wish to experience the tactile indignity of sand infiltrating every crevice of your body, clothing, luggage, and soul. During vacations in Oahu or Miami, you dutifully reserve a room overlooking the beach, then spend the day luxuriating beside the resort pool, periodically glancing toward the ocean with profound gratitude that you are not actually in it.

    Deserts present a similar paradox. From a safe distance they possess a cinematic grandeur, a landscape sculpted by eternity itself. Up close they reveal themselves to be an elaborate rehearsal for the apocalypse. Every cactus appears armed, every rock radiates hostility, and every gust of wind feels like the opening chapter of Mad Max. Your lips chap. Your skin shrivels. Your eyeballs seem to lose moisture by the minute. After forty-eight hours you become convinced you are quietly mummifying while still alive.

    Snow fares no better. Others speak reverently of winter wonderlands. You see an aggressively inhospitable climate masquerading as a Christmas card. Snow closes roads, freezes lungs, transforms ordinary errands into survival expeditions, and renders every hillside one unfortunate sneeze away from an avalanche. Even aesthetically it disappoints. An endless field of white is less majestic than monotonous, as though nature had forgotten to finish painting the landscape. Icicles, meanwhile, look less like decorations than nature’s collection of sharpened stakes awaiting an unfortunate passerby. One of your life’s quiet triumphs has been constructing a life that requires almost no interaction with snow whatsoever.

    Instead, you are captivated by what you call Unicorn Cities—those mythical communities that seem to have discovered the cheat code to geography. They enjoy unusually pleasant weather, attract unusually decent people, and somehow escape the afflictions suffered by neighboring regions. Port Angeles occupies a privileged place in this private mythology. Nestled within Washington’s Banana Belt, it promises milder temperatures than logic suggests it deserves. You are endlessly fascinated by it. You consume photographs, weather reports, and travel videos with almost devotional enthusiasm. Yet you have no real desire to go. Visiting would replace imagination with reality, and reality almost never survives comparison with imagination.

    So congratulate yourself for remaining loyal to your quiet corner of Southern California, where you leave town only reluctantly, tan in your own backyard for fifteen minutes a few afternoons each week, and venture to Hawaii or Miami once or twice a year merely to sit beside an immaculate swimming pool while gazing at the ocean from a respectful distance.

    You are, after all, a Threshold Tourist.

    A Threshold Tourist prefers to remain at the edge of an experience rather than surrender to it, extracting its beauty, symbolism, and emotional nourishment while politely declining its inconveniences. The destination is not meant to be conquered or consumed. It is meant to be contemplated. Paradise, in your estimation, is best appreciated from the balcony.

  • The Demon Lake and Heavenly Noodles

    The Demon Lake and Heavenly Noodles

    For the past two nights my subconscious has apparently dispensed with realism altogether and hired a surrealist screenwriter.

    The first dream began with an assignment that would have challenged even the most ambitious evolutionary biologist. I was ordered to travel millions of years into the past to locate one of my primordial ancestors—a prehistoric shark. Armed with nothing but a pair of pliers and inexplicable confidence, I extracted the shark’s razor-sharp teeth and painstakingly strung them into a necklace.

    This was no ordinary necklace.

    It had become my official faculty lanyard at the college where I teach.

    Somehow I lost it.

    The college president responded with the righteous fury usually reserved for embezzlement or plagiarism. She informed me that unless I journeyed back through evolutionary history, located the same prehistoric shark, and painstakingly reconstructed the necklace, I would be fired.

    The situation struck me as hopeless.

    How had I misplaced something so miraculous? How does one retrace one’s steps across millions of years? More importantly, how could anyone recreate a necklace that seemed less handcrafted than divinely manufactured? The shark’s teeth no longer felt like jewelry. They had become sacred relics, and I had managed to lose them somewhere between the Devonian Period and faculty parking.

    I awoke relieved that neither the necklace nor the disciplinary hearing had actually existed.

    Then came the following night.

    This time I found myself standing beside a dark lake surrounded by hundreds of people.

    Everyone issued the same warning.

    Do not disturb the water.

    A demon slept beneath the surface, they explained, and if awakened it would unleash unimaginable destruction upon us all.

    Unfortunately, I happened to be holding a very long stick.

    The human race has a long and distinguished history of ignoring good advice simply because the forbidden object happens to be within arm’s reach. Give Adam an apple, Pandora a box, or me a suspicious lake and an unnecessarily long pole, and curiosity will almost always defeat wisdom.

    Naturally, I stirred the water.

    The demon awoke.

    The earth shuddered. The air vibrated. Reality itself seemed to tremble as the creature announced its displeasure.

    People screamed.

    I was terrified.

    Yet there was one surprising consolation. I was frightened collectively rather than privately. Most of my nightmares isolate me inside my own panic, but this time hundreds of us shared the catastrophe. Terror, it turns out, becomes marginally more bearable when it has company.

    Eventually the demon grew bored with intimidating us and retreated once again into the depths.

    The dream then executed one of those abrupt transitions that only dreams consider perfectly logical.

    I stepped into an elevator.

    When the doors opened, I found myself in an ethereal kingdom devoted entirely to noodles.

    Not ordinary noodles.

    Transcendent noodles.

    Families, many of them from Taiwan, wandered the heavenly complex with unmistakable pride, as though civilization itself had culminated in this celestial noodle palace. They smiled with the quiet confidence of people who knew they possessed the finest cuisine in the universe.

    Hungry, I asked one family where I could find the noodle bar.

    Beaming, they pointed north.

    I confidently walked in precisely the direction that would ensure I never reached it.

    Instead, I became hopelessly lost, descended a spiral staircase, and somehow ended up asleep in the damp basement of a forgotten library.

    When I awoke inside the dream, I remembered the noodles.

    I was starving.

    Yet I had become too exhausted to climb back upstairs in search of them.

    So I settled for imagination.

    Unable to eat the heavenly noodles themselves, I pictured them so vividly that I convinced myself they might sustain me until I found the strength to move.

    Perhaps that final scene is the most revealing of all.

    Most of us spend our lives chasing some version of those heavenly noodles—peace, happiness, God, retirement, artistic achievement, perfect love, or simply the conviction that life has finally become what it was always meant to be. We receive directions. We begin confidently enough. Then we wander into the wrong corridor, descend a staircase we never intended to take, and wake up in the dusty basement of our own lives, too weary to continue.

    So we nourish ourselves with imagination until hope returns.

  • I Am a Citizen of Paradise

    I Am a Citizen of Paradise

    Last night after dinner, we were sitting at the kitchen table debating whether to try a new Thai ice cream shop at the mall when my wife informed me that I would first have to change my clothes.

    The tank top had to go.

    She explained that my tropical tank tops were perfectly acceptable within the privacy of our home, but exposing innocent members of the public to them was an entirely different matter.

    Then came the indictment.

    “You have a uniform,” she said.

    She was right.

    Twelve months a year I rotate through the same ensemble: a brightly colored tank top emblazoned with Miami or Maui, gym shorts, and flip-flops. It doesn’t matter whether the calendar says July or January. My wardrobe insists that I am perpetually fifty yards from a beach.

    I cannot dispute the charge.

    Somewhere along the way, this ceased being casual clothing and became an identity.

    I suspect my wardrobe reveals more about my aspirations than my fashion sense. For years I have fantasized about retirement, tropical climates, and that peculiar feeling of transcendence that overtakes me whenever I stand in a warm tropical rain. There is something about those moments—the humid air, the gentle rain, the lush vegetation—that dissolves the ordinary boundaries of time. Eternity no longer feels like a distant theological concept but like a change in the weather.

    Perhaps that is why I continue to dress as I do. Deep down, I am still that eight-year-old boy on Venado Court, pedaling his bicycle through a warm summer drizzle, convinced that the flashing blue lights on the distant horizon could only mean one thing: Christmas had somehow arrived in July. I am still chasing that impossible moment when the world briefly shimmered with enchantment and the ordinary became a gateway to paradise.

    Looking at my wardrobe through that lens, I realize I have been practicing what I call Paradise Cosplay: the habit of dressing as though one already inhabits the life one longs for, using clothing less as protection from the elements than as a costume for an imagined future.

    My shirts are less garments than promissory notes.

    Unfortunately, imagination has a way of flattering itself.

    The man I picture is a serene retiree strolling barefoot beneath palm trees, liberated from deadlines, meetings, and alarm clocks.

    The man reflected in the mirror looks more like a retired police sergeant or former offensive lineman wandering the suburbs after escaping from a backyard barbecue. The tank top clings with unwarranted confidence. The flip-flops slap against the pavement with all the elegance of a harbor seal. The overall effect suggests not “citizen of paradise” but “guy who might spend thirty minutes explaining the proper way to grill bratwurst.”

    My wardrobe, in other words, is less a triumph of sartorial judgment than a wearable wish-fulfillment fantasy.

    Still, I find it oddly comforting.

    Perhaps we all dress, at least in part, for the lives we hope to inhabit rather than the ones we actually possess. Some people wear power suits because they dream of becoming CEOs. Others wear designer labels because they aspire to glamour. I wear Miami across my chest because I long to believe that somewhere, just beyond the next chapter of life, warm rain is falling, palm trees are swaying, and retirement is finally waiting for me.

    I find a peculiar irony in all of this. I long for sacred time, for heaven breaking into ordinary life, yet the more intense that longing becomes, the tackier my wardrobe grows. I have fallen victim to Aspiration Kitsch: the phenomenon in which our deepest hopes become embodied in sentimental, commercial, and aesthetically questionable objects that are laughably inadequate substitutes for the realities they promise.

    A wiser man might have settled on something understated and elegant. He might have adopted the quiet sophistication of yoga attire and looked like someone who occasionally reads Rilke before meditation.

    Instead, I dress like a retired Parrot Head who has spent twenty years marinating in the food court of Margaritaville. I resemble one of those sunburned Floridians lounging on a pool float outside an Orlando condo, nursing a neon-blue cocktail the color of windshield washer fluid while Jimmy Buffett assures him that wasting away is a perfectly respectable retirement strategy.

    The contrast is almost theological.

    I yearn to inhabit a world of dignified enchantment, where warm tropical rain feels like a sacrament and eternity brushes against the present moment.

    My wardrobe keeps insisting that my highest spiritual aspiration is happy hour.