Cinemorphosis

Tag: travel

  • When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    When the Levees Broke, So Did the Nation

    The documentaries Hurricane Katrina: Race Against Time (Hulu) and Katrina: Come Hell and High Water (Netflix) are searing indictments as much as they are testaments to survival. They tell the story of a singular city—New Orleans, a cultural jewel—betrayed and abandoned by its own nation.

    Told through the voices of those who endured the storm in 2005, these films lay bare a fourfold sin against the people of New Orleans.

    First sin: red-lining. Decades of discriminatory housing policies corralled Black families into neighborhoods below sea level—neighborhoods left exposed to catastrophe—while white families secured higher, safer ground. Yet out of this coerced geography bloomed community, kinship, jazz, art, and a way of life so distinctive that New Orleans became not just a city but a state of mind.

    Second sin: neglect. The protective marshlands were carved away, the levees shoddily built, the safeguards ignored. What should have been natural resilience was dismantled piece by piece, until a storm became a man-made massacre.

    Third sin: abandonment. When the waters rose, thousands of citizens waited for rescue that never came. They suffered hunger, thirst, illness, despair. Bureaucracies paralyzed by incompetence and poisoned by political rivalry left them stranded—leaders too intent on humiliating one another to save lives.

    Fourth sin: defamation. Media outlets, infected with racism, painted Black survivors as looters and criminals while white survivors were depicted as resourceful and brave. Rumors of sniper fire and marauding gangs turned aid missions into militarized standoffs, with the National Guard pointing rifles at the very people they were sent to save. These lies fueled white vigilantes who hunted Black residents as if the collapse of law gave them license to kill.

    This fourfold betrayal is almost unbearable to watch, yet threaded through the grief is a resilient beauty: the music, the food, the language, the humor, the love of place that make New Orleans irreducible. Katrina remains one of America’s most shameful chapters—but also a reminder that the soul of New Orleans is larger than its wounds.

  • The Terrarium of the Gods

    The Terrarium of the Gods

    Last night I dreamed I was prowling for beachfront property in the dead of night when I stumbled upon a terrarium the size of several football fields—an absurd, glass-walled Eden under artificial light. Some plots were shameless cons, swindler specials dressed up with tacky lawn ornaments and fake palm trees. Others, however, had loamy, dark soil that practically hummed with fertility. Over the PA system, an NPR announcer’s warm, soporific voice guided prospective dreamers like me, pointing out which plots were worth my attention.

    I claimed a plot perfect for herbs, tomatoes, and peaches, imagining future harvests under this climate-controlled dome. Then I set off to find my family, who were dining on the rooftop of a nearby hotel, high above the night and the surf. When I arrived, they were lit with merriment, clinking glasses with friends, laughter rolling across the table like a tide.

    Leo, a family friend with the generosity of a man who’s just inherited a brewery, pressed a frosty glass stein of amber beer into my hand. I’m not much of a beer drinker, but curiosity won, and I took a long pull. It was cold, crisp, and shockingly delicious—like a liquid reprieve from all earthly woes. Before I could savor the moment, a teenage boy with only the flimsiest link to Leo snatched the stein from my hand and drained it with feral efficiency. I seethed but swallowed my annoyance.

    Leo, undeterred, promised reinforcements: more beer, plus sandwiches from “the downstairs stash.” He led me to a cold-storage room the size of a cathedral. Inside, shelves groaned under the weight of sandwiches—no ordinary deli fare, but hand-crafted masterpieces assembled by World Series legends of the 1970s. Every sandwich bore a tag in looping script: Dave Winfield. Reggie Jackson. Willie Stargell. Dave Parker. Jim “Catfish” Hunter. Preserved by refrigeration so perfect, the bread seemed freshly baked, the lettuce still crisp, as though the ballplayers had just stepped away from the cutting board.

    We loaded up on sandwiches and pitchers, returned to the rooftop, and feasted under the city lights. The beer was endless, the view intoxicating. For a fleeting moment, I felt like I had not only bought the best plot in the terrarium but inherited the whole ridiculous world.

  • Will Optimization Kill the Joy of Mechanical Watches?

    Will Optimization Kill the Joy of Mechanical Watches?

    Sometimes I wonder how technology might assassinate my love for timepieces. Picture this: a $200 spool of 3-D printer feedstock spits out your $10,000 grail watch. Eight years later, when the mechanical movement needs servicing, you don’t take it to a watchmaker—you print another.

    If watch-printing is as easy as making pancakes, I’d have thousands. Would I be happy? No. I’d be the spoiled rich kid sulking in his palatial bedroom because Mom and Dad bought him every toy but a bazooka.

    “Son, I bought you everything.”
    “But I want a bazooka.”
    “They’re illegal.”
    “I don’t care!”

    When everything is instant, the “holy grail” becomes an inside joke. The magic dies in the flood of abundance. Just ask the diamond industry. Lab-grown stones are flawless, cheap, and undetectable to the human eye—obliterating the romance of bankrupting yourself for an engagement ring. Watches could be next.

    And that’s just one front. On another, tech billionaires are funding biohackers to keep us ticking for 900 years. If I’m going to live to 85, time feels urgent. If I’m going to live to 900, time is a leisurely brunch. Chronological time starts to matter less than biological time—the wear and tear written in my cells.

    In that world, your Rolex Submariner won’t tell you what matters. Your doctor-prescribed smartwatch will, tracking cardiovascular vitality, antioxidant levels, and the sorry truth of your lifestyle choices. Refuse to wear it, and your insurance premiums explode tenfold or you’re cut off entirely. Privacy? Gone. Your vitals are known to your insurer, employer, spouse, dating app matches, and the guy at your gym checking your actuarial risk.

    When the mechanical watch dies, so does your privacy. And somewhere, Dale Gribble from King of the Hill is finding the conspiracy angle.

    Give it five years. Our “watch collector meet-up” will look more like group therapy for mechanical-watch dinosaurs funding their therapists instead of their ADs. But fear not—obsession never dies, it just changes costume. Post-watch, your new drug will be optimization.

    You’ll strap on your OnePlus Watch 3, buy a $2,600 CAROL resistance bike, and simulate being chased by a saber-toothed tiger because “hormesis”—that holy word—demands mild ordeals to make you live forever. Resistance intervals, intermittent fasting, cold plunges. Goodbye winding bezels; hello gamified cell stress.

    Our poster boy? Bryan Johnson—the billionaire fasting himself pale, zapping his groin nightly to maintain the virility of a high school quarterback. Critics say he looks like a vampire who’s just failed a blood test. I say he’s the future. Picture him at 200, marrying a 20-year-old and siring a brood. Male Potency and Reproductive Success: the distilled recipe for happiness.

    Except I’m kidding. The truth: peer-reviewed science says we might beat the big killers before 90—heart disease, cancer, stroke, Alzheimer’s—but the biological ceiling is still ~100. Eventually your organs quit. All the optimization in the world won’t rewrite that.

    As a watch obsessive, I know the tyranny of time. The biohackers are fixated on biological time as if it’s the only kind that matters. But the Greeks knew a third: kairos—the moment saturated with meaning, purpose, connection. All the Bryan Johnsons in the world can’t 3-D print that.

    Live 200 years without kairos and you’re not a winner; you’re a remake of Citizen Kane with a garage full of exotic cars and no friends.

    A long time ago, a friend told me about the night cocaine hollowed him out so completely that he didn’t care his best friend was kissing his girlfriend. Then a voice in his head said, “Dude, you should care.” He went to rehab the next day. That’s soul work.

    And that’s what’s missing from the longevity cult: soul work. Without it, all the tech, watches, and optimized mitochondria in the world are just a shiny grift.

  • Why I’ll Never Be a Normal Tourist

    Why I’ll Never Be a Normal Tourist

    I don’t deserve a nice vacation. Who am I to lounge in tropical paradise, sipping a Miss Sunshine on the rooftop of Tommy Bahama’s in Honolulu—a lemon-infused Grey Goose cocktail dressed up with coconut and salted honey, basically sunshine in a martini glass?

    Yet that’s exactly what I did on my last night in town. My family and I ate dinner under the soft glow of string lights while a guitarist named Mark worked the crowd. He had that rare gift of making diners feel the music was just for them. My daughter requested Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” Mark delivered it like a love letter. I followed with The Go-Betweens’ “Streets of Our Town.” He’d never heard of it. Then I tried “Back to the Old House” by The Smiths. His eyes lit up.

    “Oh, you’re one of those,” he said, as if I’d just flashed a velvet-lined membership card to the Melancholy Music Society. “Are you a musician?”

    I admitted to being an amateur pianist. During his break, we talked shop. He’d been gigging since 1979, grew up on Oahu, and had soured on Maui—“negative energy,” he said, with the certainty of a man who’s read the island’s aura. His favorite? The Big Island, especially Hilo. “Hilo’s the lush side,” he told me, as if revealing a secret password.

    The next day, stuck in the Honolulu airport waiting for a delayed United flight (short a flight attendant, with a substitute speeding in from home), I met Zack—a 48-year-old professional golf caddy with the leathery tan of someone who spends life between fairways and airports. He was headed to Houston, then on to Kansas City for a tournament at Blue Hills Country Club.

    We talked for forty-five minutes about the job. “You have to make a world-class golfer like you, trust you, and win,” I told him. “That’s harder than being a psychiatrist.”

    He grinned. “Same as being a college writing instructor.”

    Touché. We agreed we were both part salesman, part psychologist.

    Zack checked his watch. “If I make my Houston connection, I get Texas brisket with my family before the drive to KC.” His wife taught French at an Oahu high school; they’d lived there over twenty years. Like Mark, he loved the Big Island most. Also like Mark, he worshipped Hilo. In fact, he’d bought land there for his retirement.

    On the flight, I lost myself in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four on Audible, forgetting about Zack—until landing, when the flight attendants asked passengers to clear the way for passengers with tight connections. At the back, there was Zach, looking like he’d just played eighteen holes without water.

    With the authority of a man who’d just been handed the Staff of Moses, I raised my hand: “Make way for my friend Zack! He has three minutes to make his connection!” The crowd parted. As he hurried past me, I patted his back and told him to enjoy the brisket.

    My wife nearly folded in half laughing at my grandiosity, my habit of turning chance encounters into minor epics. At baggage claim, she called Mark and Zack my “new friends.”

    She’s right. I may never learn to truly relax on vacation. But give me a stranger with a story, and I’ll make a night of it.

  • Ghosts at Pearl Harbor: A Morning of Reverence and Unease

    Ghosts at Pearl Harbor: A Morning of Reverence and Unease

    Yesterday we drove thirty minutes from the Embassy Suites in Waikīkī to the Pearl Harbor Memorial, where solemnity hangs in the air like thick humidity. The journey from beachfront ease to battlefield remembrance felt immediate and irreversible.

    Inside the visitor center’s theater, a National Park spokesperson stood behind a lectern—short, compact, dark-haired, with the confident charisma of someone who has delivered this message a thousand times, and still means every word.

    “You’re not on a must-see tour,” he said, with an edge of reprimand. “You’re visiting a mass military gravesite. This is more than a military tragedy—it’s familial. Thousands of children lost their parents that day. That grief doesn’t expire. It echoes. Please treat this place with respect—not as a TikTok backdrop.”

    I thanked him on the way to the dock. His words stripped away any residue of tourism and replaced it with reverence.

    We boarded a navy-operated boat alongside a quietly murmuring mix of global visitors—Germans, Japanese, mainland Americans, Australians. The boat was packed, but no one jostled or joked. You could feel the history pressing in from all directions.

    At the memorial itself, I tried to read the names etched into white marble. I tried to focus. But I was distracted—haunted—by two figures lingering at the edge of my vision.

    They were brothers, unmistakably. In their thirties, pale as winter ash, with dirty-blond hair and heads shaped like crude pyramids. Their eyes—almond-shaped, off-kilter—glinted with something sharp. Their teeth were crooked and small, the kind that suggest years of silent snarling. They were so wiry, so sunken, that even their frosted skinny jeans hung like surrender flags around their twiggy legs. Nicotine-stained, post-industrial, almost spectral.

    They spoke in rapid whispers—something Slavic, maybe Czech or Slovak—always leaning close, always glancing. They radiated the kind of anxious secrecy that suggested they were either up to something or simply never learned how not to seem that way.

    Everyone avoided them. Even when we were asked to scoot together on the boat to make room, the brothers sat untouched—shunned like they carried some forgotten plague. They were the kind of figures who seem pulled from the margins of a Dostoevsky novel or the casting list of a horror film.

    I can’t stop thinking about them. What drew them to Pearl Harbor? What shadow were they following? Their presence felt less like tourism and more like reconnaissance. In another life, in another medium, they could be characters in a Safdie brothers film—like John the heavy from Uncut Gems, who wasn’t an actor at all, just a force of nature discovered on the street.

    You can’t invent that kind of menace. You can only observe it, marvel at it, and wonder: what story did they bring to the memorial, and what story did they take away? And why in my heart do I see them less as tourists and more as criminals embarking on some kind of scheme? 

  • The Accidental Tourist, Redux

    The Accidental Tourist, Redux

    Yesterday, we flew from LAX to Honolulu aboard a gargantuan United jet so large I half expected to see shag carpet and a spiral staircase to a smoking lounge. The thing was practically a flying condominium—wide-bodied, high-ceilinged, and just roomy enough to avoid triggering my usual claustrophobia. Even while pinned to the aisle seat as fellow passengers formed a stagnant TSA-themed flash mob to jam their overpacked luggage into the overhead bins, I managed to breathe.

    I passed the flight in my usual state of high-functioning dread, retreating into Jim Bouton’s Ball Four on Audible through my Sony noise-canceling headphones—the only legal form of sedation I can stomach at 35,000 feet. Forget reading, forget movies, forget chit-chat. Air travel reduces me to a vibrating vessel of cortisol unless I can disappear into the low, comforting drone of a narrator’s voice. It’s less entertainment and more emergency emotional triage.

    Mid-flight, I spotted a man in first class—reclined, smug, his chest puffed like a hawk surveying the terminal. He wore a Rolex Submariner, its gleaming bracelet catching the light like a flex. For a moment I considered violating my long-standing ban on watch bracelets. But then I re-centered myself. No, I thought. No shiny metal shackles. Stay true to your rubber-strap asceticism.

    As we deplaned and shuffled past the first-class cabin, it looked less like a luxury lounge and more like the aftermath of a Roman orgy. Gargantuan seats sat slumped under rumpled cashmere blankets, like spent emperors. Empty champagne flutes glistened in the overhead lights. Half-melted caviar pearls clung to fine china, and artisanal pizza crusts lay abandoned, their truffle oil sheen dulled by neglect. It was less aviation and more archaeological dig—excavating the indulgences of the airborne elite.

    After getting our luggage, we skipped the usual rental car shuttle chaos (unlike in Maui or Kauai) and simply walked across the street to pick up our reserved vehicle. It was almost… dignified.
    Pro Tip: Disconnect your Sony headphone app before navigating to the hotel, or your phone will whisper silent directions to your eardrums while you make wrong turns into private military roads.

    This morning’s Embassy Suites breakfast buffet was a competent affair—dark coffee, lukewarm eggs, and a waffle station overseen by a teenager with the haunted eyes of someone six minutes into an eight-hour shift. Still, it did the job. Sustenance secured.

    Before the trip, friends warned me that Oahu lacks the charm of the smaller islands. So far, I find that advice overstated. Yes, there are people. But they’re spread out, like tourists in a theme park operating at 60% capacity. Manageable. Tolerable. Occasionally amusing.

    What continues to fascinate me is the ABC Store phenomenon. Every island has them, and each one is a bustling shrine to overpriced macadamia nuts, sunburned tourists, and cold bottled water with just enough condensation to feel spiritual. They are the Walmarts of Waikiki, the cathedrals of caffeine and aloe, always stocked, always staffed by saints, always crawling with those of us trying to patch together a sense of stability while wearing flip-flops and SPF 70.

    As I sit here contemplating the beach and the impossibility of relaxing, I realize something: I don’t know how to vacation. I don’t know how to unplug. I don’t know how to vanish. Perhaps it’s time I reread Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist and finally admit I’m the kind of man who travels with headphones, anxieties, and an internal spreadsheet of projected discomforts.

  • Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    Kettlebells, Clorox, Waikiki Dread, and the Need to Reread Ariel Leve’s An Abbreviated Life

    At nearly sixty-four, I still work out like a man who thinks death is watching from the corner of the garage, arms crossed, waiting to pounce the moment I skip a kettlebell swing. I train with the same primal urgency I felt at thirteen—when muscle equaled safety, and soreness meant I still mattered. I think about workouts. I talk about them. I bore people to death with unsolicited fitness manifestos. My obsessions are a carousel of age, mortality, exercise, oatmeal breakfasts, French-press coffee, and a pathological resistance to anything resembling leisure, especially vacations.

    Which brings me to now: it’s Sunday, and in a few hours my wife’s friend will drive us to LAX so we can board a United flight to Oahu. I should be thrilled. I’m not. I feel like a hostage in my own well-appointed life. I’m going only because family life requires the occasional sacrifice—and this is mine. A three-night stay at the Embassy Suites in Waikiki Beach. Palm trees. Breezes. Ocean sunsets. All of it unnerves me. I want to be helpful, gracious, even grateful—but I am a neurotic, OCD-addled man-child in a do-rag who agonizes every morning over which chunky diver watch to wear, like I’m prepping for surgery on the space-time continuum.

    I do not want to be the dead weight on this trip.

    Still, I try to prepare. My comfort rituals are in full swing. We’re packing two memory foam pillows because hotel pillows have the spinal integrity of a wet napkin. I created a “Travel Checklist” yesterday with over 30 items. My wife flagged two of them—Clorox gel and a scrub brush—and asked why I intended to pack janitorial supplies. “To disinfect the hotel shower,” I said. She told me I’m crazy. Scratch that from the list.

    We’ll land around eleven tonight, pick up the rental car, check in, visit ABC Store #38—because no Hawaii trip is complete without wandering into an ABC Store to buy bottled water, toothpaste, and the spiritual reassurance that you haven’t forgotten something vital. Then we’ll sync our devices to the hotel WiFi, maybe sit on the bed and stare blankly at the TV for twenty minutes before collapsing into our pancake pillows (if the foam ones failed to survive the suitcase crush). By the time I feel vaguely human, it will be midnight.

    And just like that, the countdown begins.

    We fly back Wednesday. Back to LAX. Back to my routine. By Thursday morning, I’ll be at Trader Joe’s shopping for groceries, then in the garage doing kettlebell swings to reassert my identity as a disciplined, slightly unhinged older man who treats a three-day vacation like a stint in exile.

    My wife’s friends raised their eyebrows when they heard how short the trip is. “That’s all my husband can take,” she told them. I felt seen and exposed all at once. It hit me while writing this: it really is a short trip. I feel guilty for being the reason we trimmed it down to a long weekend. And yet—I’m also relieved. Too much freedom, too much unstructured joy, and I begin to unravel. I need my routines. I need the Mothership. Without them, I drift.

    I’m reminded of a memoir I read nine years ago and plan to reread after this trip: An Abbreviated Life by Ariel Leve. It’s about surviving childhood under the tyranny of a narcissistic, chaotic mother. Leve writes with scalpel precision about how chronic trauma rewires the brain, how the child adapts with emotional detachment and hypervigilance, and how adulthood becomes a performance of normalcy built on damaged circuitry. Her memoir is unsentimental, razor-sharp, and achingly honest. I admire her. In some cracked mirror, I recognize myself.

    When I return from Oahu, I’ll dig up my old copy of her book. It’ll be the perfect homecoming gift—a reminder that healing is a long-haul flight, often with delays, turbulence, and very bad pillows.

  • Royal Palm Mirage: A Midlife Fantasy in Flip-Flops

    Royal Palm Mirage: A Midlife Fantasy in Flip-Flops

    I am in agony—real, soul-bruising agony—because for the past few months, I have been drunk on the seductive fumes of a dream: early retirement in Royal Palm Beach, Florida. Not Palm Beach proper—no, that would be too garish, too Gatsby. I mean the inland cousin, fifteen humid miles from the Atlantic, nestled inside a gated community with a neighborhood pool, a bubbling hot tub, and the promise of palms swaying while my family lounges like extras in a Jimmy Buffett fever dream.

    This fantasy has infected my sleep, crept into the margins of my Google Maps history, and left me hypnotized by listing photos of stucco homes with outdoor ceiling fans and screened-in lanais. I dared to believe I could trade my overworked California existence for a new life—a life of 5 a.m. swims, grocery runs in flip-flops, and the quiet joy of hearing my daughters say, “I’m bored,” while floating in chlorinated bliss.

    And then—smack. My wife crushed the dream with one phrase: “Florida’s a big no.”

    Just like that, the mirage dissolved. I am at the age—let’s not name it—where the idea of fleeing to a tropical holding cell with reliable AC and an HOA that enforces silence after 9 p.m. sounds not just reasonable but romantic. But maybe that’s the trick. Maybe Florida isn’t salvation. Maybe it’s a siren song crooned by real estate agents with perfect teeth and mosquito-resistant tans.

    Next week we fly to Oahu, and yes, I hope my family finds some version of the enchantment I’ve been chasing. But let’s be honest: deep in the humid corners of my heart, I’ll still be yearning for Royal Palm Beach—a gated Eden with pool rules and a hot tub that works.

  • Heaven, Apparently, Has a Library

    Heaven, Apparently, Has a Library

    A month ago, I dreamed I was already in heaven—which is to say, I was somewhere astonishing and didn’t realize it, because apparently that’s the human condition.

    It started in a classroom, naturally. I was teaching at a college that felt familiar but off—like a liberal arts Hogwarts or a Wes Anderson remake of Dead Poets Society. The students were unnervingly sharp. Not freshmen. These were postgrads of the soul—opinionated, caffeinated, and engaged with the material in ways that implied they’d actually done the reading.

    We were knee-deep in discussion when I glanced out the window and saw the rain falling—not pelting, but gliding, like silk scarves from the sky. I drifted for one moment. That was all Tim Miller needed.

    Tim, a student and part-time podcast prophet, seized the room like a man born to lecture. He told everyone to open the expensive blue textbook. The one I assigned. The one I had never read. I stared at the cover like it was an unfamiliar casserole I’d brought to a potluck. “What did you think?” I asked, bluffing. “It’s okay,” they said. The academic equivalent of a shrug at your own funeral. I nodded, defeated, and dismissed them early—a mercy for us all.

    Outside the door, a nearsighted colleague half my age pushed a convoy of book carts like a noble foot soldier. I offered help. He smiled, already finished. I was obsolete, politely.

    I wandered the campus like a ghost who hadn’t been told he was dead. Then I saw it: a green coffee mug I’d left behind earlier, now glowing like a sacred artifact on a forgotten table. I snatched it and jogged through the rain to the library. I placed it on a windowsill with reverence, and two librarians appeared—silent, reverent, stunned. I’d returned the Holy Mug. They smiled as if I’d cured blindness.

    Still raining. Still warm. Still beautiful. I pulled out my phone—also green, because apparently I was living inside an emerald dream. It was dusted with beach sand, and I wiped it down like it was a relic I wasn’t worthy to hold.

    I wasn’t driving. I never drove. Why ruin the moment? I walked. Five miles, barefoot, maybe. The rain was gentle, more sacrament than storm.

    Then, through the mist, I saw my home.

    Three pyramids, each one the size of a small mountain, woven from stone in purple and gold. They spiraled into the sky like something the gods forgot to take with them. I’ve always loved purple. It makes sense now. But the gold—that was new. I’ve spent a lifetime disliking gold. Too gaudy. Too Trump Tower. Too cheap. But this gold wasn’t decoration—it was divine. It pulsed. It whispered. It glowed like it remembered being forged in the heart of stars.

    And it hit me.

    I lived there. In that zigzagged trio of pyramids, tucked in the mist. It was mine. I’d always been there. Somehow, until that moment, I’d failed to see it.

    Then I woke up.

    No rain. No pyramids. Just me, blinking in the early gray, stunned by the feeling that I’d glimpsed something holy and managed to mistake it for Tuesday.

    And I wondered: How much of life am I sleepwalking through? What miracles have I mislabeled as mundane? What if heaven isn’t a reward but a frequency we forget to tune in?

  • Calories in a Dream Don’t Count: A Glutton’s Redemption Story

    Calories in a Dream Don’t Count: A Glutton’s Redemption Story

    Last night I dreamed myself into a surreal mashup of The Great British Bake Off, Yellowstone, and a calorie-induced nervous breakdown.

    It began at a retirement party for D, a former colleague who had apparently left academia behind to study gourmet pastry arts in Europe. Now reborn as a culinary goddess, she presided over a dining room that looked like it had been styled by a Michelin-starred fever dream: trays of deconstructed brownies arranged like abstract sculpture, sourdough donuts with the texture of warm clouds, cinnamon rolls coiled with existential menace, and a chocolate cake so dense it might have had its own gravitational field.

    In the corner sat a magical grand piano, humming with faint luminescence. I was meant to play it—perhaps to provide ambiance for the pastry rapture—but I never made it past the donuts. They called to me. I answered with both hands and minimal dignity.

    Mid-binge, I was struck with a bolt of dietary guilt. I remembered I had a dinner date with my wife at her best friend C’s house. Worse, it wasn’t just any dinner—it was a social obligation. I arrived in C’s oversized dining room to find the ghost of a party long gone. Tables were abandoned like an upscale Pompeii, the air buzzing with lazy flies circling over still-warm piles of food: chicken pot pies glowing under golden crusts, French dips bleeding delicious regret, carne asada tacos wafting guilt into the air, and blueberry pie with a lattice crust so precise it looked like it had been braided by angels.

    I ate. With one hand I fed myself; with the other, I held my phone to my ear, explaining the situation to my wife. She responded with calm detachment: “When you’re done, meet us in Montana.”

    Of course. Montana.

    I was then transported—no explanation needed, dream logic intact—to a bustling Montana restaurant. I wandered from table to table in search of my wife, passing clusters of archetypes: the Trust Fund Cowboy, the Patagonia-clad Nutrition Mystic, the Ex-Brooklyn Homesteader. They were deep in conversation about the social fault lines of modern Montana. At one table, a blonde woman lectured an enraptured audience. “There are only two kinds of people in Montana,” she declared. “Old-comers and New-comers. And the old-comers don’t want anyone else coming.”

    Enter my friend Mike—ex-Navy SEAL, tropical city-builder, and walking rebuttal to provincial snobbery. He appeared like the Deus ex Machina he is, still radiating heat from his last humanitarian war-zone operation.

    I turned to the blonde know-it-all. “Mike’s a new-comer,” I said, “but he built an entire city in the tropics in under forty-eight hours. Not only could he settle in Montana—he could govern the state.”

    Silence fell. Victory was mine.

    But before I could savor the moment, I was ambushed by a different horror: the specter of calories consumed. The desserts at D’s party, the savory gluttony at C’s—how much damage had I done? Had I ruined months of progress? Was I now one sourdough donut away from emotional collapse?

    And then I woke up. The sweat was real. The calories were not.

    Relief washed over me like cold Montana spring water. My body was intact. My diet undisturbed. I had survived the sugar apocalypse, and all of it—Mike, Montana, the magical brownies—had happened in the safe, consequence-free realm of REM sleep.