Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    The Prophet of the Squat Rack

    My middle school P.E. coach and Olympic weightlifting instructor, Lou Kruk, was not merely a teacher. He was a force of nature. Standing well over six feet, barrel-chested beneath tight T-shirts or black turtlenecks, sporting a Tom Selleck mustache, wavy brown hair, perpetually tanned legs protruding from gym shorts, and a voice that rumbled like Wolfman Jack after three cups of espresso, Kruk looked less like a school employee than the star of an action movie who had wandered onto campus by mistake.

    The mythology surrounding him only enlarged the legend.

    He drove a bronze Porsche. Rumor had it he spent weekends sailing with impossibly beautiful blonde women who, in our adolescent imaginations, might as well have been Scandinavian supermodels. Whether any of it was true hardly mattered. At thirteen, facts were powerless against charisma.

    To us, Lou Kruk embodied manhood itself.

    Naturally, we craved his approval with the desperation of medieval squires hoping to earn a knight’s blessing.

    So we lifted.

    Not casually. Fanatically.

    Kruk demanded perfect technique. He regarded sloppy form as a moral failure disguised as athletic incompetence. A wandering knee or rounded back earned immediate correction, usually delivered with enough volume for the entire class to hear. Public embarrassment was simply another teaching aid. If you couldn’t discipline your body, he reasoned, you probably couldn’t discipline your life.

    He preached through barbells rather than sermons.

    Discipline.

    Precision.

    Toughness.

    Master yourself before the world masters you.

    Oddly enough, Kruk possessed another passion that seemed entirely at odds with Olympic lifting.

    Henry Mancini.

    Instead of blaring hard rock through battered speakers, our weight room echoed with Mancini’s lush orchestrations. As we practiced snatches, clean-and-jerks, and deep squats, elegant movie themes drifted through the air. Kruk had assembled a respectable stereo system, transforming what should have resembled a dungeon into something closer to a strangely sophisticated temple of iron.

    We trained with style.

    Some of us trained with obsession.

    I belonged to the second category.

    Soon I wasn’t content to squat only during workouts. I squatted beside my locker. I squatted while inching forward in the cafeteria lunch line. I squatted during P.E. while playing goalkeeper as soccer balls sailed harmlessly overhead. If there was an idle moment lasting more than five seconds, I considered it wasted unless my knees were bent and my thighs were burning.

    Eventually my classmates stopped calling me Jeff McMahon.

    I became “Squats.”

    At the time, I regarded the nickname as a badge of honor. I was no longer merely a skinny kid trying to become stronger. I had become an exercise, a living advertisement for relentless self-improvement.

    Only years later would I understand what was really happening.

    I wasn’t simply building legs.

    I was constructing an identity.

    The barbell had given me my first Great Mutation—not because it transformed my body overnight, but because it convinced me that reinvention was possible.

    And once a boy discovers the intoxicating possibility of becoming someone else, he spends the rest of his life wondering whether one more transformation might finally make him whole.

  • The Theology of Big Biceps

    The Theology of Big Biceps

    In my imagined novel Lifter, I borrow a page from Emmanuel Carrère and turn the investigation inward. The subject is not merely my lifelong devotion to weight training but the psychic hunger that made it feel less like a hobby than a form of emergency intervention. Why did I begin lifting weights at twelve? What wound was I trying to cauterize? What fear was I trying to overpower? Looking back, I suspect I wasn’t chasing health so much as prescribing therapy for a spirit burdened by cowardice, insecurity, and an almost inexhaustible sense of inadequacy.

    The story begins before I ever touched a barbell.

    As a boy, I was consumed by baseball. I imagined myself as a fearsome slugger, not because I dreamed of leading the league in home runs, but because I wanted opponents to recoil at the sight of me before I ever stepped into the batter’s box. My heroes were not graceful athletes. They were broad-shouldered giants: Willie McCovey, Harmon Killebrew, Dick Allen, Greg Luzinski, and Reggie Jackson. But towering above them all stood the legendary Ted Kluszewski, whose biceps were so enormous that, in my child’s imagination, they simply burst through the sleeves of his uniform like the Incredible Hulk erupting from Bruce Banner’s skin.

    Only now do I recognize what fascinated me.

    It wasn’t baseball.

    It was metamorphosis.

    I wasn’t captivated by batting averages or slugging percentages. I was captivated by spectacle. I wanted the crowd to gasp before I ever swung the bat. I wanted my body to announce my arrival before my performance had the chance to disappoint. I longed to become less an athlete than a mythical creature who wandered accidentally onto a baseball diamond.

    In that fantasy, my muscles eclipsed the game itself.

    The home run was secondary. The physique was the event.

    Even as a child, I wasn’t pursuing athletic excellence so much as theatrical transformation. I wanted to become someone so physically overwhelming that ordinary rules no longer applied. If my body could become extraordinary enough, perhaps it could silence the ordinary boy trapped inside it.

    That dream would outlive baseball.

    It would follow me into bodybuilding, weightlifting, teaching, writing, and nearly every other pursuit I embraced. The details changed, but the longing remained stubbornly intact. Again and again, I sought transformation through achievement, hoping that each new accomplishment would finally extinguish the old feeling of insufficiency.

    It never did.

    The weights built stronger shoulders and thicker arms, but they proved remarkably ineffective at strengthening self-worth. Every reinvention promised belonging. Every reinvention postponed it.

    Perhaps that has been the real story all along.

    The barbell was never merely a piece of exercise equipment. It was my first attempt to lift something far heavier than iron. I wasn’t trying to transform my body so much as reinvent my soul. In the end, however, the Theology of Biceps proved incapable of saving me.

  • The Hidden Strength of American Loneliness

    The Hidden Strength of American Loneliness

    In his Atlantic essay “American Loneliness,” Yair Lapid approaches America with the fresh eyes of an outsider. Americans, immersed in their own culture, rarely notice the water they swim in. Lapid does. What he sees is a nation shaped by an affliction so pervasive that many Americans mistake it for ordinary life: loneliness.

    To Lapid, loneliness is not merely being alone. It is exile. He writes, “People like me—the children of the non-American world—are accustomed to thinking of loneliness as a kind of slow sadness. Loneliness is the failure to connect, the disintegration of a family, the collapse of community. Loneliness means you have fallen from a train and are lying beside the tracks, listening to the shriek of the whistle dying in the dark.” What Americans often accept as the inevitable cost of adulthood appears, to someone raised elsewhere, almost biblical in its severity—a banishment into the outer darkness.

    Over the past thirty-five years, Lapid has crossed America repeatedly, driving its highways, stopping at diners, gas stations, drugstores, and roadside cafés. Those travels have led him to reject the fashionable caricature of America as a nation consumed by violence, paranoia, and xenophobia. He has encountered something far less sensational: ordinary people who are generous, decent, and welcoming. The darker portrait of America, he argues, often comes from what he calls the “malicious gossip” of commentators who mistake hyperbole for insight because outrage attracts attention.

    Strip away the exaggeration, however, and one profound truth remains. America is lonely.

    That loneliness began with immigration itself. Millions crossed oceans seeking opportunity, but they paid for it by severing themselves from families, villages, languages, and traditions. They arrived carrying not only hope but also a deep sense of dislocation. Unlike societies that prize the family or the collective, America has long celebrated the self-made individual. The heroic image of the rugged pioneer carries a hidden cost. Independence often means separation.

    Geography reinforces the condition. America is immense. Its vastness allows reinvention, but it also makes disappearance easy. One can vanish into a new city, a new state, or an entirely new life without anyone noticing.

    Progress deepens the isolation. Lapid invokes Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction,” the process by which capitalism continuously replaces the old with the new. New technologies do not simply create industries; they erase them. They dissolve careers, weaken inherited authority, scatter communities, and reorder entire ways of life. Americans have long embraced this relentless churn because they believe tomorrow can be better than today. Yet every leap forward leaves someone standing amid the rubble.

    The Protestant work ethic intensifies the pattern. Americans devote extraordinary energy to achievement, often sacrificing community in pursuit of success. The rewards are undeniable. America has produced astonishing advances in technology, medicine, literature, music, entrepreneurship, and cinema. But the same relentless drive that fuels innovation can also leave people spiritually isolated, making them more vulnerable to addiction, extremism, and despair.

    For Lapid, these forces converge into a startling conclusion: loneliness is not an unfortunate by-product of the American experiment. It is one of its founding materials. As he writes, “Loneliness is not a glitch in the system; it is the raw material from which the system was built.”

    Yet Lapid does not regard this as a fatal weakness. On the contrary, he believes America’s unusual tolerance for upheaval gives it an advantage over many of its rivals. He worries more about Europe, whose attachment to tradition may inhibit adaptation. He is pessimistic about Russia, whose wars threaten to destroy public confidence in the state. He is skeptical that China’s centralized political system can absorb the economic and social disruptions that rapid technological change will bring.

    America, by contrast, has spent centuries reinventing itself.

    As Lapid memorably observes, “America is not a cathedral—it is a workshop.” Workshops are noisy, untidy places where old things are dismantled so new things can be built. They value experimentation over preservation and movement over permanence. Americans have repeatedly endured the loneliness that accompanies such transformation, and in doing so they have developed an unusual resilience.

    Lapid therefore arrives at a paradox. In much of the world, loneliness signals failure, abandonment, or despair. In America, it often signals something else entirely. It is the emotional price of mobility, reinvention, ambition, and progress. Americans do not merely endure loneliness; they incorporate it into their national identity. As Lapid puts it, they are “turning loneliness into a covenant.”

    Whether that covenant is ultimately a blessing or a curse remains an open question. But Lapid persuades us that it is one of the defining features of the American character—a burden that has produced extraordinary innovation even as it has left countless people searching for the connections that progress so often leaves behind.

  • What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    What Happens After Peak Watch Addiction? 

    When I uploaded my first YouTube video fifteen years ago, I approached the medium with all the technical sophistication of America’s Funniest Home Videos circa 1990. I had recently fallen under the spell of Seiko and Citizen watches and possessed exactly enough knowledge to be dangerous. I wasn’t a curator. I was a caveman who had just discovered fire. My videos consisted largely of me staring in astonishment at a titanium Citizen Promaster, hoping viewers might catch the same contagious wonder. My outfits were not professional. I was wearing a bathrobe with Cheerios clinging to the lapel and a milk mustache under my nose.

    The set looked as though a laundromat had exploded behind me. Laundry baskets overflowed with unfolded clothes. The lighting was so dreadful that viewers could never be entirely certain whether I was filming from my office or haunting a Medieval dungeon. As for focus, let us simply say that sharp images were treated as an optional feature rather than a design requirement.

    Eventually I purchased a better camera and developed a passing acquaintance with lighting and autofocus. But while I was taking baby steps, YouTube entered the Space Age. Channels began deploying drones over great white sharks, robotic camera rigs that glided through African safaris, helicopters circling erupting volcanoes, and editing suites that looked as though they had been borrowed from Christopher Nolan.

    I, meanwhile, was Fred Flintstone pedaling my Stoneage vehicle into a Tesla convention.

    Curiously, as YouTube marched into the future, I wandered in the opposite direction.

    I rarely make traditional watch videos anymore. Partly that’s because my collection has stabilized. I no longer acquire enough watches to justify another breathless “State of the Collection” update, a genre that now feels about as fresh and exciting as Hootie & the Blowfish.

    But something deeper also changed.

    I became uncomfortable participating in what I now recognize as the economics of envy. Every glossy close-up, every dramatic wrist roll, every thumbnail promising the next grail watch risks manufacturing dissatisfaction in viewers who were perfectly happy with their collections until five minutes earlier. I know because I spent years falling into exactly that trap myself.

    Instead of filming watches, I began interrogating the psychology behind collecting them.

    The channel gradually evolved into something resembling a podcast with occasional wrist shots. I developed a lexicon describing the peculiar madness of watch collecting and eventually self-published a book containing more than one hundred entries. Among them is what I call The Watch Potency Principle: as a collection expands, each individual watch loses a little of its emotional power. Eventually the collector experiences a crisis, sells everything in pursuit of liberation, discovers that liberation is strangely unsatisfying, and begins buying watches all over again. Repeat until death. Tolkien called this Gollum. I called it the process of Gollumification. 

    Having spent years dissecting the disease, I find myself with surprisingly little left to diagnose.

    That leaves my YouTube channel in an awkward adolescence.

    I don’t want to retire it because I genuinely enjoy making video essays. But I no longer possess the manic enthusiasm that algorithms adore. I am still a watch collector, just no longer in my Peak Addiction Period. Unfortunately, emotional equilibrium is terrible for audience engagement. YouTube rewards obsession far more enthusiastically than contentment.

    The truth is, I am also an extraordinarily boring man.

    I live in suburban Torrance. There is precious little cinematic drama in watching me search for a parking space at Costco, call a plumber when the shower backs up, or negotiate a family summit over the proper method for removing a daddy longlegs from my daughter’s bedroom wall. The algorithm craves spectacle. I offer plumbing invoices.

    People sometimes ask why I don’t pivot into politics.

    The answer is simple. Modern politics has become professional wrestling with legislation attached. Policy increasingly serves as the pretext for performance. Every public figure must become either the Hero or the Villain. Every disagreement requires apocalyptic language. Every debate ends with someone declaring civilization itself to be on the brink of collapse.

    I have no talent for that performance because I can see the stage directions.

    If my channel survives, it has to survive because I mean what I say, not because I have mastered the latest choreography of outrage.

    So here I am.

    I am sixty-four years old. I have spent forty years teaching writing, fifty years lifting weights and obsessing over nutrition, and twenty-five years collecting watches. By any reasonable measure, I should know exactly who I am.

    Instead, I find myself confronting an unexpected truth.

    I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up.

    Perhaps that uncertainty is no longer something to hide.

    Moving forward with the uncertainty is the story.

    If my YouTube channel has a future, I suspect it won’t be about watches at all. It will be about what happens after the obsessions cool, after the algorithms lose interest, and after a man discovers that the hardest collection to curate is not the one in his watch box, but the unfinished life still ticking quietly inside himself.

  • I’m a Radio Man Trapped in a YouTube Video

    I’m a Radio Man Trapped in a YouTube Video

    On the final episode of The Gist, Mike Pesca—who is leaving to assume an executive role at a still-undisclosed institution—lamented the passing of an older form of media. He spoke about the intimacy of hearing a voice without being forced to watch it. A voice enters your home stripped of spectacle. It asks for attention rather than demanding it. It does not require jump cuts, dramatic lighting, animated captions, exaggerated facial expressions, or an algorithm trained to hijack your dopamine receptors. Pesca admitted that one reason he was ending The Gist was simple: he no longer wished to compete in the circus.

    He spoke warmly of Julia Turner, whose Culture Gabfest has also come to an end. He noted that Marc Maron has little interest in becoming another video personality. Although Pesca didn’t mention them, Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog of Blocked and Reported have similarly resisted reshaping their podcast into a YouTube product. Pesca observed that the retirement of Maron, the disappearance of Culture Gabfest, and the end of The Gist signal “the end of an era.”

    Listening to him, I realized I have been mourning that era for some time.

    Shortly afterward, David Greene closed an episode of Left, Right & Center by announcing the retirement of NPR’s Don Gonyea. Another unforgettable voice was disappearing from my daily life. I found myself oddly saddened. I wasn’t losing a face. I was losing a companion. Don Gonyea will be missed. So will Marc Maron. So will Mike Pesca. 

    It finally dawned on me while listening to Mike Pesca’s farewell episode of The Gist: I spent fifteen years making YouTube videos, but I was never really a YouTuber. I was a radio man trapped inside a YouTube video.

    I have never formed a deep attachment to YouTubers or Instagram personalities. I connect with voices. I grew up in the age of radio, when a voice carried enough authority to build an audience and enough warmth to become part of a family’s routine. I still remember the oversized preset buttons on my parents’ turquoise Chrysler Newport as Dionne Warwick asked if we knew the way to San Jose and The 5th Dimension floated “Up, Up and Away” through the speakers. In the 1970s, my mother’s Panasonic RF-1080 seemed permanently tuned to KGO 810 AM. Jim Eason, Jim Dunbar, and Ron Owens narrated our days with such consistency that they became as essential to the household as breakfast. When we visited my grandparents in Los Angeles, Michael Jackson drifted through the house while conversations about politics, books, and current events unfolded around him. Living among ideas was not an extracurricular activity. It was simply what adults did.

    Some of my happiest childhood memories involve nothing more than lying on a couch or sitting on the porch while an AM radio broadcaster called a baseball game. Those voices carried me into a dream world more comforting than the one outside my front door. Even now, I suspect that paradise sounds less like angels singing than a baseball announcer calmly describing a lazy fly ball to center field.

    When podcasts emerged in the early 2010s, they felt like radio reborn. I loved the voices. I loved the predictability. A good podcast possessed architecture. It opened with one segment, moved naturally into another, and arrived at a satisfying conclusion. As a writing instructor whose life revolves around lesson plans, outlines, and coherent arguments, I appreciated that structure. A podcast respected the listener’s attention instead of treating it as prey.

    Video rarely shows the same respect.

    Too often, it reshapes personalities into algorithmic caricatures. Everyone speaks with theatrical urgency. Every thumbnail depicts someone whose eyes appear to have witnessed the Second Coming or an alien invasion. Every headline promises that everything you believe has just been DESTROYED. Outrage has become less an emotion than a production budget.

    The internet has perfected a new facial expression: the clickbait gasp. Apparently, no thought is complete until someone opens his mouth wide enough to swallow the thumbnail.

    I find the entire performance exhausting.

    When I think back to watching The Dick Cavett Show as a ten-year-old, I remember almost nothing about the visuals. I remember Cavett’s voice—curious, literate, skeptical, and wonderfully patient. He made intelligence sound inviting rather than performative. Listening to him, I wanted to inhabit a world where thoughtful people spoke in complete sentences, entertained competing ideas, and considered nuance a virtue instead of a liability. Perhaps Cavett planted the seeds of elitism in me. If a conversation lacked subtlety, I assumed it lacked seriousness.

    Reflecting on Pesca’s farewell forced me to confront my own fifteen years on YouTube.

    Technically, I have always been hopeless. More than once I filmed a watch review so badly that the watch itself remained stubbornly out of focus while the comments section delighted in informing me of my incompetence. As YouTube evolved into an increasingly polished medium—with cinematic lighting, drone footage, elaborate editing, and graphics worthy of cable television—I never evolved with it.

    Nor, I eventually realized, did I want to.

    My interest gradually shifted away from close-up glamour shots of luxury watches and endless “State of the Collection” videos. I became more interested in why we chase possessions than in the possessions themselves. My videos became essays disguised as watch content. The algorithm, understandably, was unimpressed.

    Recently I noticed that six weeks had passed since I uploaded a video.

    I am not abandoning the channel. But I have become suspicious of speaking merely because the algorithm demands another upload. I have no desire to become someone who mistakes constant broadcasting for having something worth saying. Every new video should earn its existence. It should contribute something I have not already said. It should reflect genuine conviction rather than anxiety about disappearing.

    Perhaps that standard is impossibly high.

    Or perhaps it is simply what growing older feels like.

    I am sixty-four now. The older I become, the less interested I am in producing content and the more interested I am in producing thought. The algorithm rewards frequency. Age rewards discrimination.

    If I have learned anything from listening to voices like Mike Pesca, Don Gonyea, Dick Cavett, Jim Dunbar, and Marc Maron, it is that the medium was never the point. The point was never to command attention. It was to deserve it.

    Maybe that is the real end of the era—not the disappearance of podcasts, but the fading belief that a single thoughtful voice, speaking without spectacle, is enough.

    I hope it still is.

  • The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose was the stage name bestowed upon Jeff McMahon, a college writing student, bodybuilder, and part-time laborer at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits on Tunnel Road beside the Claremont Hotel. From 1983 to 1987, the store hosted wine tastings three evenings a week. There were bottles from Bordeaux, Napa, and Tuscany, a polished grand piano in the corner, and customers who came expecting Cabernet, Brie, and melancholy in equal measure.

    The ritual never varied.

    McMahon would be hidden away in the walk-in cooler stacking cases of beer or downstairs wrestling heavy crates of wine. His black T-shirt was perpetually torn, his forearms tattooed with cardboard abrasions, nicks from broken bottles, and fresh cuts courtesy of overzealous box cutters. He looked less like a concert pianist than a dockworker who had taken a wrong turn into a music conservatory.

    Soon someone at the tasting bar would ask, “Where’s Lachyrmose?”

    Another voice would join in. Then another. Before long the room itself seemed to chant for him.

    Store owner Solomon Khan, who understood that theater sells almost as well as Chardonnay, would smile knowingly. If every chair around the tasting bar had been claimed, he would haul out more until the room resembled an impromptu recital hall. Only then would the Great Lachyrmose make his entrance, emerging dramatically from the cellar or the refrigerator like some wounded Romantic hero ascending from the underworld.

    Without ceremony he would sit at the piano and spend the next hour filling the room with mournful nocturnes, elegiac waltzes, and slow-moving ballades that drifted through the store like woodsmoke on a winter evening. Conversations softened. Wine glasses paused halfway to waiting lips. Even the cash register seemed embarrassed to interrupt.

    The most enchanting audience members were the neighborhood’s young mothers.

    They would arrive carrying restless infants whose nightly resistance to sleep had exhausted every parental strategy except surrender. Somehow the Great Lachyrmose accomplished what rocking chairs, lullabies, and desperate pacing could not. One melancholy piano piece after another worked its quiet spell until tiny eyelids surrendered. The babies collapsed into peaceful sleep with astonishing reliability. Their grateful parents would offer Lachyrmose a smile and a gentle nod before slipping out into the Berkeley night, precious cargo cradled carefully in their arms.

    It became one of the strangest guarantees in town. Jackson’s could promise good wine. Lachyrmose could promise sleeping babies.

    As the years passed, however, something inside the pianist began to shift. He grew restless with his own success. He wanted brighter harmonies, quicker tempos, unexpected turns. He wanted music that laughed as often as it sighed.

    His audience revolted.

    The regulars did not come for experimentation. They came for emotional comfort. They wanted the familiar sorrow they had come to love, returning to those melancholy melodies with the same devotion families reserve for a grandmother’s chicken pot pie. Every new composition was politely tolerated before someone inevitably asked for one of the old sad songs.

    Success had quietly become a cage.

    The Great Lachyrmose had become a prisoner of his own repertoire.

    So when McMahon accepted his first college teaching position, he quietly retired the character and left Jackson’s behind. For the first time, he could play whatever music interested him rather than whatever melancholy his audience wished to hear.

    He gained artistic freedom, but he lost something as well.

    He lost the strange little community that had gathered around a grand piano in the corner of a wine shop. He lost the nightly ritual of emerging from the cellar to a room full of expectant faces. He lost the grateful parents carrying sleeping babies into the darkness.

    Even now, decades later, he occasionally misses the Great Lachyrmose. The music has changed. Life has changed. But belonging—that rare feeling that one’s peculiar gifts answer someone else’s unspoken need—is not so easily replaced.

  • The Hairball Apocalypse and the Courage to Snake a Drain

    The Hairball Apocalypse and the Courage to Snake a Drain

    Hair buildup in the shower drain has clogged the primary bathroom about half a dozen times over the past twenty-four years. The warning signs never change. Murky, fetid water begins rising inside the marble shower basin, and with it rises my imagination. Within seconds I have diagnosed tree roots invading the pipes, a collapsed main sewer line, catastrophic plumbing failure, and the financial ruin that surely follows.

    Reality is considerably less cinematic.

    We’re talking about hair.

    I have called plumbers in the past. This time I decided to become one—or at least impersonate one.

    I borrowed my neighbor’s hand-held auger and spent the evening crouched over the shower, sweating through my shirt while my knees protested every minute on the tile floor. The auger finally broke through the clog. Victory. I turned on the shower, watched the water disappear, and congratulated myself.

    Two minutes later the water was pooling again.

    Apparently, I had not defeated the enemy. I had merely tunneled through it.

    So I waited for the water to drain, fed the auger back into the pipe, cranked again, and tried another test. This time the shower remained clear for nearly three minutes before surrendering once more to the same soggy defeat.

    The diagnosis had become obvious.

    I needed to go deeper.

    My neighbor owns a drill-powered auger, but when I borrowed the manual one around seven o’clock the previous evening, he answered the door wearing a bathrobe and dripping wet after climbing out of his hot tub. It seemed an inappropriate moment to ask for a plumbing tutorial. Some acts of neighborliness should have limits.

    Today I’ll borrow the powered version.

    Better yet, I have already bought my own. I ordered a RIDGID Power Spin, which works either by hand or by attaching it to my DeWalt drill. The hand crank removes, the drill locks onto the drive shaft, and suddenly I possess a machine whose existence I was blissfully unaware of forty-eight hours ago.

    The RIDGID arrives in a couple of days.

    Now I have to learn how to use the thing.

    This matters for reasons that extend well beyond one clogged shower.

    In principle, I should not have to pay someone hundreds of dollars to spin an auger down a drain. In principle, I should not become helpless every time a clog predictably appears after business hours, on a weekend, or during a holiday. In principle, I should understand that knowledge and self-reliance are among the most effective antidotes to anxiety.

    The clog itself was never the real problem.

    My ignorance was.

    There are, it seems to me, two kinds of homeowners. The first sees a wad of wet hair, sighs, reaches for the proper tool, and solves the problem before dinner.

    The second sees the identical clump of hair and imagines collapsing sewer lines, excavators in the front yard, and a plumbing invoice large enough to require grief counseling.

    I have spent too much of my life belonging to the second category.

    My goal is to graduate into the first.

    So I will arm myself with knowledge, a RIDGID Power Spin, and the quiet confidence that comes from knowing the difference between a plumbing emergency and a hair clump masquerading as one.

    Of course, I also bought plumber’s gloves, work goggles, knee pads, and heavy-duty coveralls.

    I only hope they transform me into a competent handyman.

    Otherwise, I have merely assembled an exceptionally convincing handyman costume.

  • Why a Watch YouTuber Like Myself Must Not Commit the Sin of Narrative Overstay

    Why a Watch YouTuber Like Myself Must Not Commit the Sin of Narrative Overstay

    For fifteen years you made YouTube videos, most of them about watches and the peculiar form of madness that convinces otherwise rational adults that the next dive watch will finally complete them. By now, you have mapped the terrain. You have dissected the psychology of acquisition, status, collector fever, diminishing returns, and the fantasy that fulfillment lies one purchase away. There is little left to excavate. Every new video feels suspiciously like an old one wearing a different thumbnail.

    Meanwhile, you have changed.

    You are sixty-four. Your curiosity has wandered far beyond bezels, lume, and power reserves. You want to make video essays about books, politics, religion, technology, aging, and the strange civilization we have built for ourselves. But YouTube has little interest in intellectual wanderers. It rewards specialists. The algorithm is less a patron of curiosity than a prison warden, forever reminding inmates to stay inside their assigned cell.

    You could obey. You could continue manufacturing watch videos until retirement.

    But doing so would require confronting a condition I call algorithmic senescence: the stage in a creator’s life when the platform’s demand for endless specialization collides with the creator’s natural intellectual evolution, making continued participation feel less like mastery than slow decay.

    The decay itself, however, is not the real tragedy.

    The greater loss is dignity.

    I have developed an almost visceral aversion to seeing myself on camera. It is tempting to blame vanity, age, or the unkindness of high-definition video, but none of those explanations reaches the heart of the matter.

    The face is not the problem.

    The performance is.

    I no longer look like a man animated by genuine fascination. I look like a man trying to resurrect yesterday’s enthusiasm because today’s algorithm still pays for it. There is a painful difference between devotion and obligation, and the camera captures that difference with forensic precision. The eyes know. The voice knows. The audience knows.

    What appears on the screen is not passion.

    It is lingering.

    It is the unmistakable look of someone who should have exited several scenes earlier but remains onstage because he cannot quite bring himself to leave. Every upload risks looking less like an act of creation than an appeal for relevance.

    This is another condition entirely.

    It is Narrative Overstay: the unsettling realization that one’s public story has reached its natural conclusion, yet one continues performing it out of habit, audience expectation, or financial inertia.

    The internet is crowded with practitioners of Narrative Overstay. Aging influencers desperately imitate the mannerisms of younger creators. Musicians spend decades touring on songs they no longer inhabit. Television series limp through unnecessary seasons because the ratings remain adequate. Politicians mistake longevity for indispensability. Everyone keeps performing after the story has quietly ended.

    The audience often cannot identify exactly what has changed.

    They simply sense that something essential has departed.

    The urgency is gone.

    The necessity is gone.

    Only the content remains.

    So, for now, I write.

    A blog imposes no algorithmic lane. It allows curiosity to roam wherever it pleases. One day I can write about Frederick Douglass, the next about ultra-processed foods, then TikTok, theology, watches, democracy, or the peculiar sadness of algorithmic civilization. The only governing principle is whether the subject deserves thought.

    Perhaps I will return to YouTube someday.

    But if I do, it cannot be because an algorithm has assigned me another shift inside the watch factory.

    It must be because I once again have something I cannot keep myself from saying.

    Until then, my dignity depends on remaining off camera.

  • When Reading Lost to the Dopamine Feed

    When Reading Lost to the Dopamine Feed

    Rose Horowitch’s essay “The End of Reading Is Here,” published in The Atlantic, chronicles more than the decline of reading. It examines the kind of mind that flourishes after reading has surrendered. Citing data from the National Endowment for the Arts, she notes that fewer than half of American adults read any kind of book in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. By 2023, a mere 16 percent reported reading for pleasure.

    What filled the vacuum? Gambling.

    Nearly 60 percent of Americans now gamble. We have traded one form of anticipation for another. Instead of turning pages in search of revelation, we pull slot-machine levers and refresh sports-betting apps in pursuit of dopamine.

    Even the books that survive have changed. Sentences are shorter. Syntax is simpler. Apparently, asking readers to navigate a few dependent clauses before arriving at the independent clause is now considered an unreasonable burden. The modern sentence has become a microwave dinner: engineered for speed, stripped of complexity, and consumed with minimal effort.

    The same contraction has reshaped our news diet. Long-form reporting that patiently excavates facts has given way to sixty-second video clips engineered for maximum stimulation. The reward is immediate. The understanding is shallow. It requires no political science degree to imagine what happens to a democracy when its citizens lose both the patience and the habit of sustained attention.

    Horowitch argues that this decline in reading parallels a decline in critical thinking itself. Increasing numbers of adults struggle to comprehend what they read, distinguish evidence from assertion, or draw reasonable conclusions. If adulthood once implied literacy, then America is drifting toward a peculiar form of cultural infantilization—a nation increasingly vulnerable to demagogues, conspiracy peddlers, and professional grifters eager to convert intellectual laziness into political capital.

    The greatest irony is that Americans have never consumed more words.

    We read texts, emails, Slack messages, Instagram captions, TikTok comments, headlines, notifications, and endless streams of digital debris. Never has so much language been processed to produce so little contemplation. We are drowning in words while starving for thought.

    That is why Horowitch describes America as becoming postliterate—not because language has disappeared, but because sustained reading has. Literacy once demanded immersion. Postliteracy rewards interruption.

    Nor has this transformation stabilized. It is accelerating. Each generation spends less time reading books and more time marinating its attention inside algorithmically curated feeds. Television, for all its faults, never possessed this power. During the television era, people still disappeared into novels on weekends and carried paperbacks to the beach. TV occupied a room. Smartphones occupy consciousness itself. They transformed distraction from an activity into a permanent habitat.

    I have watched this transformation from a privileged vantage point. For nearly forty years, I have taught college writing.

    The curriculum my colleagues and I teach today would have been almost unrecognizable when I began. We rarely assign long books. Many instructors assign none at all. My freshman composition course still requires one short classic, Frederick Douglass’ Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. My critical thinking course assigns no books whatsoever. Instead, students read essays from The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. I upload the readings into Canvas, then spend class breaking them into digestible segments through Google Slides. Each slide contains roughly one hundred words followed by a discussion question that forces students to wrestle with the author’s reasoning one piece at a time.

    Some critics insist that professors should simply assign longer books and demand compliance. That fantasy evaporates the moment it encounters reality. Students vote with their enrollment. Assign too much reading, and many will either avoid the course altogether or quietly migrate to instructors who require less. Consumer demand has entered higher education whether professors approve or not. As students’ habits change, curriculum follows. The postliterate marketplace shapes the classroom long before faculty meetings do.

    Yet calling ours a “postliterate society” risks flattening important distinctions.

    My students are mostly between eighteen and twenty years old. Yes, they grew up on TikTok, YouTube, and Instagram. Yes, many arrive having read remarkably few books. But they are also intellectually curious. They enjoy argumentation. They respond viscerally to sharp prose, elegant rhetoric, and clever turns of phrase. They relish exposing logical fallacies and dismantling weak arguments. Once you capture their attention, they often surprise you with the sophistication of their thinking.

    They are not representative of America at large.

    A first-generation college student eager to transform his life occupies a different intellectual universe than an adult who never pursued higher education, works a dead-end job, and spends every evening numbing himself with algorithmic entertainment. Both may read fewer books than previous generations, but their relationship to knowledge is hardly the same. There is no single postliteracy. There are many varieties of it.

    Technology rewires us from the inside out. I can measure the changes in my own brain. At sixty-four, I find myself fighting distractions that barely existed thirty years ago. My attention requires more vigilance than it once did. The temptation to surrender to endless scrolling is no respecter of age, education, or profession. Digital gravity pulls on all of us.

    There is no reversing this transformation. The toothpaste is out of the tube. The smartphone is not going away. Artificial intelligence is not going away. Algorithmic media is not going away. We are not marching back to 1975 carrying hardcovers beneath our arms.

    That reality, however, should make us suspicious of sweeping declarations about postliteracy. Horowitch rightly identifies genuine losses: diminished attention spans, weaker reading comprehension, and shrinking tolerance for intellectual complexity. But we have also developed new literacies. We decode memes, navigate digital ecosystems, detect online irony, understand platform cultures, and learn new technologies with astonishing speed. Our cognitive landscape has not simply shrunk. It has been reorganized.

    Whether that reorganization represents progress remains an open question.

    I doubt we will someday revolt against TikTok and rediscover Tolstoy en masse. The fantasy of 90 percent of Americans reading one hundred books a year belongs somewhere between nostalgia and science fiction.

    Still, I hesitate to declare the reading life permanently dead.

    Human beings possess an appetite that algorithms cannot completely satisfy. Endless novelty eventually becomes monotonous. Constant stimulation eventually feels empty. Even the most dedicated scroller occasionally hungers for something with weight, texture, and permanence—an idea worth wrestling with rather than merely reacting to.

    Curiosity has survived every technological revolution humanity has endured. It survived radio. It survived television. It may yet survive TikTok.

    The reading brain has been wounded.

    I am not convinced it is beyond recovery.

  • Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    Beyond the Platitude “Believe in Yourself”

    In the documentary Queen of Chess, Judit Polgár recounts how she became a grandmaster at the age of fifteen, shattering one of the oldest gender barriers in competitive chess. She entered a world where many male players regarded women not merely as underdogs but as biological impossibilities. Looking back on her extraordinary rise, she credits her parents with many gifts, but one towers above the rest: they taught her always to believe in herself.

    I have heard those words my entire life. Believe in yourself. They are stitched onto graduation speeches, embroidered across motivational posters, and recited by well-meaning adults with the mechanical confidence of people reading assembly instructions. The phrase has always struck me as strangely hollow, a verbal vitamin whose label promises transformation while omitting the active ingredient. Yet when Judit Polgár uttered those same words, they landed differently. Here was someone who had walked into hostile rooms, defeated the world’s strongest players, and emerged victorious. Her confidence had survived contact with reality. That gave the cliché a gravity it had never possessed before.

    Over the months since watching the documentary, I have tried to understand what believing in yourself actually means. It is not wishful thinking, nor is it chanting affirmations in the bathroom mirror before work. It is trust. It is the confidence that your conscious intentions and your unconscious habits are allies rather than enemies. It is the quiet expectation that when difficulty arrives, you will respond with discipline instead of sabotage. Believing in yourself also means possessing the assurance that you belong in rooms where others doubt your right to enter. It is the conviction that closed doors are obstacles to overcome rather than verdicts to accept.

    The difficulty, at least in my case, is that I have accumulated decades of evidence against myself. My adversary has never been an unsympathetic chess establishment. It has been the unruly republic inside my own skull. I resolve to become more patient, then lose my temper over some trivial irritation before lunchtime. I promise to eat sensibly, only to find myself negotiating peace treaties with pizza and signing unconditional surrender documents to apple pie crowned with vanilla ice cream. I announce noble intentions with presidential confidence, while my appetites quietly stage a coup before dinner. After enough of these episodes, self-doubt ceases to be a philosophical problem and becomes a statistical conclusion.

    Then there is vanity, perhaps the most elegant form of self-deception ever invented. Blaise Pascal observed that we expend more effort creating the appearance of virtue than acquiring virtue itself. I have often found that observation painfully accurate. It is easier to curate the image of a disciplined life than to endure the discipline required to build one. Vanity offers applause without achievement, while laziness quietly pockets the bill. Together they form a conspiracy against genuine confidence. You cannot consistently admire a person who repeatedly breaks promises to himself, even when that person happens to be you.

    Of course, recognizing these flaws carries its own danger. Honest self-examination can quickly mutate into sophisticated excuse-making. One can become so fascinated by one’s defects that they begin functioning as permanent alibis. “This is simply who I am,” the inner defense attorney argues, as though diagnosis absolves responsibility. It does not. Accurate self-knowledge should produce accountability, not acquittal.

    That is why I admire Judit Polgár. Her confidence does not appear theatrical or narcissistic. It rests upon competence, discipline, and years of keeping promises to herself. I suspect her parents did more than encourage her to believe in herself. They taught her to become the sort of person who deserved her own trust.

    For those of us who did not inherit that gift so naturally, there is another path. We cannot manufacture self-belief through slogans. We must earn it the old-fashioned way, by repeatedly choosing character over compulsion, humility over vanity, discipline over appetite, and substance over performance. Confidence is not bestowed by motivational speeches. It is accumulated, one kept promise at a time.