Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    The Temu-ization of Everything—Again

    I’m reading Cory Doctorow’s freshly minted Enshittification. Early on, he revisits Facebook circa 2010: the honey pot that lured billions before curdling into a slurry of compulsion loops, conspiracy gristle, and industrial-scale data mining. It’s sharp, it’s punchy—and it gave me déjà vu. Then my stomach dropped: I like the coinage, I like the thesis that we’re living through the Enshittocene, but the insights feel old. Jaron Lanier mapped a lot of this terrain eight years ago in Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I’ve taught over the last seven years.

    Doctorow’s Amazon chapter triggers the same shrug. The platform seduces us with convenience, tightens its talons, and gradually morphs from glossy marketplace into Temu-adjacent bazaar. True, and thoroughly litigated across a thousand essays and think pieces. We’ve been warned about the house always winning; we don’t need another tour of the casino floor.

    What I wanted—and didn’t get—was a deeper dive into the anthropology of the rot. Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” or “Joan Is Awful” doesn’t just wag a finger at platforms; it autopsies the psyche and the systems. New Yorker writer Kyle Chayka nails the gap: Enshittification is “pointed and efficient,” but reads like “professional blogging extended for three-hundred-plus pages,” leaving you hungry for a larger cultural x-ray that goes beyond the usual suspects.

    To be fair, packaging a messy discourse into one memorable term matters; not everyone read Lanier or binged Brooker. Doctorow’s snark has its uses. A clean label can move an idea from seminar rooms to dinner tables. But once you’ve named the disease, the next move isn’t to repeat symptoms; it’s to map vectors, power centers, and countermeasures with fresh cases outside the Big Tech pentagon.

    So yes: I love the word. But the book left me underwhelmed. Doctorow has given us the bumper sticker; I’m still waiting for the field manual. The Enshittocene doesn’t need another catalog of platform sins—it needs a blueprint that shows how to break the flywheels, where policy and design can bite, and why our appetites keep refilling the trough. Name the era, sure. Now show us how to survive it—and, if we’re lucky, how to end it.

  • State of the Misalignment Situation

    State of the Misalignment Situation

    I had hoped my blog, Cinemorphosis, would feed my video essays—serve as a compost heap of half-baked thoughts that could later bloom into something cinematic and worthy of making video essays. Instead, the blog has swallowed the energy that once went into my videos. What was meant to be a support system has become a rival ecosystem. The crossover I imagined—the blog fueling the videos and the videos enriching the blog—never happened. It turns out writing and filming come from different parts of the brain, and those parts refuse to share the same neural conference room.

    Friends say, “Don’t sweat it, McMahon. Just lean into the blog and let the videos go.” Easy advice for people who aren’t haunted by the specter of irrelevance. I can’t shake the feeling that the video essays keep me sharper—more visible, more alive. The blog satisfies my mind; the camera keeps me from turning into dust.

    Sam Harris once said he can spend five years writing a book, agonizing over edits and the publishing gauntlet, only to reach a few thousand readers—if he’s lucky. Meanwhile, a one-hour podcast can reach millions overnight, and snippets of it go viral before the author’s espresso cools. That line haunts me. The medium matters. The way we reach people has become part of the message.

    I see the same logic in my own small way. A blog post I’m proud of might earn a few dozen engagements. A decent video essay? Thousands of views, maybe more. But numbers only tell part of the story. The real draw is the vitality the videos demand—something performative, almost athletic. When I’m on camera, I feel like I’m “getting my reps in,” keeping mentally limber. The blog is therapy; the videos are training.

    Still, there’s a fine line between vitality and vanity. Part of me believes the videos keep me youthful, engaged, even relevant. Another part suspects it’s all just a resistance workout against mortality. Staying fit is one thing; refusing to age gracefully is another. Desperation doesn’t wear well on men over sixty, even under good lighting.

    So maybe writing suits me better now. Maybe the written word is the right pace for a man learning to accept that his eyesight, patience, and tech literacy are all in slow retreat. Maybe I should only return to video when I have something worth saying—something that isn’t just a performance of endurance.

    Which brings me to the real question: what do I still have to contribute?

    For over a decade, my YouTube channel orbited around my watch obsession. That obsession gradually narrowed until it became monastic—just diver watches, all on straps. I convinced myself that a collection larger than seven would doom me to spiritual ruin. I also stopped flipping watches like a Wall Street day trader, deciding it was bad for my mental health. That slowdown siphoned the manic energy that used to fuel my videos. The creative rush didn’t vanish—it simply rerouted into blog posts about my newest fixation: alignment. Or more precisely, misalignment.

    Because if I’m honest, I feel increasingly out of sync with the modern world. I adapt to new technology at the pace of continental drift. TikTok bewilders me. Smartphones offend my thumbs. Driving at night now feels like a scene from Apocalypse Now. My relevance, visibility, and patience are fading in a culture that worships youth and touchscreens.

    My anxieties about self-worth and mortality are now on the front burner, while watch collecting—the “Watch Potency Principle,” the “wrist-rotation anxiety”—has been moved to the back burner where it is simmering to a lukewarm stew.

    To illustrate my current state: two weeks ago, I bought a new LG OLED TV, which was fine—until I broke two Samsungs in one day trying to move them. I manhandled the first 55-inch like it was a kettlebell, frying half its pixels in a single jerk. Then I jammed my thumb straight through the second screen while relocating it from my daughter’s room. My wife, the household adult, had to carry the new Roku replacement into our bedroom as I stood there looking like a Neanderthal who’d just discovered electricity—and promptly electrocuted himself.

    My war with technology didn’t end there. The new garage door opener came with instructions written in a dialect of cruel mockery. The installer vanished without explaining how to sync it with my phone, so my wife once again had to step in and figure it out. Now I open the garage door through an app, and every time I hear the alert that the door is moving, I step back in awe—half-terrified, half-mesmerized—like a caveman who’s just invented fire.

    I feel both too old for this world and too infantile to function in it. A man-baby marveling at his gadgets, bewildered by his own house. Think about that. My house has become a museum for technology of the future while I wander through it like a mesmerized tourist. My mouth is agape and my daughters say to me, “Relax, Dad, this is our house.” I respond by saying, “No it’s not. It’s a museum of strange and wonderful things that I don’t know how to use.” 

    These are the moments that give me content for my blog Cinemorphosis. I post almost daily, while it takes me weeks to metabolize these experiences into something coherent enough for a video essay. Writing helps me think; filming helps me pretend I’m still current.

    So that’s my current state of affairs. This channel used to be State of the Watch Collection. Now it’s more like State of the Man Who Can’t Sync His Garage Door Opener.

  • The Eight Ages of –ification

    The Eight Ages of –ification

    From Conformification to Enshittification: how every decade found a fresh way to ruin itself.

    The Age of Decline, Accelerated

    In Enshittification, Cory Doctorow argues that our decline isn’t gradual—it’s accelerating. Everything is turning to crap simultaneously, like civilization performing a synchronized swan dive into the sewer.

    The book’s subtitle, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It, suggests that degradation is now both universal and, somehow, fixable.

    Doctorow isn’t the first prophet to glimpse the digital abyss. Jaron Lanier, Jonathan Haidt, and other cultural Cassandras have long warned about the stupidification that comes from living inside the algorithmic aquarium. We swim in the same recycled sludge of dopamine and outrage, growing ever duller while congratulating ourselves on being “connected.”

    This numbness—the ethical anesthesia of the online age—makes us tolerate more crappiness from our corporate overlords. As the platforms enshittify, we invent our own little coping rituals. Some of us chant words with –ion suffixes as if they were incantations, linguistic ASMR to soothe our digital despair.

    When I saw Ozempic and ChatGPT promising frictionless perfection—weight loss without effort, prose without struggle—I coined Ozempification: the blissful surrender of self-agency to the cult of convenience.

    Now there’s an entire liturgy of –ifications, each describing a new layer of rot:

    • Enshittification — Doctorow’s coinage for the systematic decay of platforms that once worked.
    • Crapification / Encrappification — The transformation of quality into garbage in the name of efficiency.
    • Gamification — Turning life into a perpetual contest of meaningless points and dopamine rewards.
    • Attentionification — Reducing every act of expression to a plea for clicks.
    • Misinformationfication — When truth becomes a casualty of virality.
    • Ozempification — Replacing effort with optimization until we resemble our own avatars.
    • Stupidification — The great numbing: scrolling ourselves into idiocy while our neurons beg for mercy.

    But the crown jewel of this lexicon remains Enshittification—Doctorow’s diagnosis so precise that the American Dialect Society crowned it Word of the Year for 2023.

    Still, I’d like to push back on Doctorow’s suggestion that our current malaise is unique. Yes, technology accelerates decay, but each era has had its own pathology—its signature form of cultural rot. We’ve been creatively self-destructing for decades.

    So, let’s place Enshittification in historical context. Behold The Eight Ages of –ification: a timeline of civilization’s greatest hits in decline.

    1950s — Conformification

    The age of white fences and beige minds. America sold sameness as safety. Individuality was ironed flat, and television became the nation’s priest. Conformification is the fantasy that security comes from imitation—a tranquilized suburbia of identical dreams in identical ranch homes.

    1960s — Psychedelification

    When rebellion became transcendence through chemistry. Psychedelification was the belief that consciousness expansion could topple empires, if only the colors were bright enough. The result: self-absorption in tie-dye and the illusion that enlightenment could be mass-produced.

    1970s — Lustification

    A Freudian carnival of polyester and pelvic thrusts. From Deep Throat to Studio 54, desire was liberation and the body was both altar and marketplace. Lustification crowned pleasure as the last remaining ideology.

    1980s — Greedification

    When morality was replaced by market share. The decade baptized ambition in champagne and cocaine. Greedification is the conviction that money cleanses sin and that a Rolex can double as a rosary.

    1990s — Ironification

    The decade of smirks. Sincerity was cringe; irony was armor. Ironification made detachment the new intelligence: nothing believed, everything quoted, and feelings outsourced to sarcasm.

    2000s — Digitification

    Humanity uploaded itself. Digitification was the mass migration to the screen—the decade of Facebook envy, email anxiety, and dopamine disguised as connection. We stopped remembering and started refreshing.

    2010s — Influencification

    When everyone became a brand. Influencification turned authenticity into a business model and experience into content. The self became a product to be optimized for engagement.

    2020s — Enshittification

    Doctorow’s masterstroke: the final form of digital decay. Enshittification is what happens when every system optimizes for extraction—when user, worker, and platform all drown in the same algorithmic tar pit. It’s the exhaustion of meaning itself, disguised as progress.

    Epilogue: The 2030s — Reification

    If trends continue, we’ll soon enter Reification: a desperate attempt to make the unreal feel real again. After decades of filters, feeds, and frictionless fakery, we’ll long for something tangible—until, inevitably, we commodify that too.

    History repeats itself—only this time with better Wi-Fi.

  • Caveman Meets Garage App

    Caveman Meets Garage App

    In March 2005, at 43, I was besotted with my Classic iPod and its holy clickwheel. It took a minute to learn how to tether it to desktop iTunes and wrangle my playlists (mostly podcasts), but I did it without pestering my wife, and I was proud. A newer iPod arrived soon after; I refused to learn its tricks. Once I master a gadget, it becomes my comfort zone—I’d rather live there than relocate.

    I listened to podcasts all night and during post-workout naps. My life felt archived in that iPod, which—ridiculously, wonderfully—made me feel plugged into the modern world.
    My wife, less sentimental, declared it obsolete. The future was smartphones. I recoiled. They looked like bricks of chaos—apps, updates, notifications—houseplants with demands, only worse because I had to squint at ant-sized text.

    By 2014, I still clung to the iPod. It wasn’t cheap loyalty: the headphone jack snapped about once a year, and I’d pay $70 at the local shop to resurrect it. Then September 2014 arrived, our twin daughters started preschool, and my wife insisted I get a smartphone—for school runs, doctor visits, playdates. Texting was essential; parenthood demanded it.

    So I pried my fingers off the fossil and bought a Galaxy S4 at Costco. To my surprise, downloading podcasts was blissfully easy. As a podcast machine, the phone was a star. Everything else? Lame. I hated watching tiny videos, reading tiny text, and spelunking for apps. The phone became a super-iPod; the rest of its features were just extra chaos. Texting was torture—my fat fingers whacked the wrong letters, and I backspaced my way through tedium. I barely used the thing except for podcasts. My wife envied my perpetually 90% battery; to console her, I’d brag that after an all-night podcast binge I dropped to a shocking 80%.

    Yes, smartphones are addiction machines that track, nudge, and strip privacy. True. But I only use a sliver of their powers because the tactile experience annoys me.

    Part of me resents the smartphone for killing the rotary landline. That dial’s ratcheting click felt like reciting a secret code to open a cave. Beige, avocado, mint green, custard—those phones had heft that implied quality, with long, flexible cords that snaked across the room. Conversations were events; an ear would grow tender and force the ritual mid-call ear swap. Now the landline is dead—and so, largely, are conversations, replaced by texts and emojis. Speed and convenience exacted their toll: degraded communication, which means degraded friendships.

    Cory Doctorow gave us enshittification—how tech optimizes itself into garbage. I’d love to say that’s why I resist. But that’s too pat. I’m simply slow to adapt. Incompetent with new tools. My memory refuses the steps; I have to re-teach myself, again and again.

    Recently, my wife synced my phone to our garage door. A week later, I tapped the app and watched the door rise, gawking like a caveman who just discovered fire and is already imagining a barbecued brontosaurus rack. It’s a good trick. I still keep Genie remotes in the house and car as backups, but the phone option is lovely. This isn’t enshittification; it’s the opposite—unsuckification. Some things that used to suck don’t have to anymore.

    In fact, I’m eager for toilet + AI matrimony: a throne that reads biomarkers, prescribes medication, screens like a colonoscopy, and spares me the waiting room. I’m also rooting for a custom GLP-1 patch that recalibrates appetite so a morning bowl of porridge with protein powder—and another in the late afternoon—actually sates me. Easy weight management, better markers, minimal dishes.

    All of this is part of the unsuckification project.

    I’ll admit it: I’m older, I resist change, and new tech gives me a headache. But if modern tech can spare me a colonoscopy, open heart surgery, and the indignities of being twenty pounds overweight, then sign me up. 

  • Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    Comparison Is the Mother of Misery

    The mother of misery is comparison. In fourth grade I plunged into despair because I couldn’t draw like Joseph Schidelman, the illustrator of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. About the same time, baseball humbled me: my bat speed wasn’t in the same galaxy as Willie Mays, Dick Allen, or Henry Aaron. In my teenage bodybuilding years, I had muscles, but nothing like that of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sergio Oliva, and Frank Zane; I wisely retired the fantasy of becoming Mr. Universe and managing a gym in the Bahamas. In college, as an aspiring intellectual, I flogged myself for lacking Vladimir Nabokov’s wit and velocity. My chances of becoming a famous novelist were equal to my odds of winning Mr. Olympia. Later, when I flirted with composing and singing, I heard Jeff Buckley’s soul pour through the speakers and realized my voice would mainly trigger a neighborhood dog-barking contest and a chorus of angry neighbors. Decades passed. My classroom persona faced a generation handcuffed to smartphones and ChatGPT. I scrambled for “edutainment” tricks to dodge irrelevance, but the gap widened no matter how I danced.

    The sting doubled when I watched Earthquake (Nathaniel Stroman) flatten an audience with a preacher’s cadence and bulletproof wisdom. His special Joke Telling Business left me muttering, “If I had Earthquake’s power, I could resuscitate my teaching career and stroll into old age with a shred of dignity.”

    Meanwhile, fresh incompetencies arrived like junk mail. I broke two Samsung TVs in one day. I failed to sync my new garage door opener to my phone. My wife had to rescue me from my own maladroit tech spiral. The result was predictable: I was condemned to the Shame Dungeon.

    Down in the basement of depression, I noticed another casualty: my YouTube channel. I usually post once a week and have for over a decade—mostly about my obsession with diver watches. But as sanity demanded I stop flipping watches, I ran out of new divers to discuss. I tried pivoting—open with a little watch talk, then segue to a wry misadventure with a morsel of human insight. If I nailed the landing, I’d get a few thousand views and enough comment energy to believe the enterprise mattered.

    But with my sixty-fourth birthday closing in, the doubts got loud. I don’t want to do “watch talk,” and I’m too mortified to perform a perky, self-deprecating monologue about my misalignment with the universe.

    I keep hearing Mike Birbiglia in my head: you must process your material before you present it; the set has to be a gift, not your live catharsis. The healing happens before you step onstage. You speak from the far shore, not mid-drowning. Otherwise, you’re asking the audience to be your therapist.

    So I’m stuck at a fork: Will this current fear and anxiety about age and disconnection pass through the refinery of my psyche and emerge as something worthy? Or will I remain in the Shame Dungeon, comparing myself to Earthquake, and decide that with talent like his prowling the earth, my best move is to hide under a rock?

    Here’s the dilemma plain: Hiding isn’t viable; it starves the soul. But serving the world a plate of unprocessed mediocrity is just as unforgivable. If I’m going to tell a story about breaking two TVs and my garage-opener meltdown, I have to deliver it with Earthquake’s power and confidence. Otherwise I’ll stay home, mope on the couch, and binge crime documentaries—losing myself in bigger, cleaner tragedies than my own.

  • The Sycophant Parade That Followed Charlie Sheen

    The Sycophant Parade That Followed Charlie Sheen

    I’ve got nothing against Charlie Sheen, which makes it stranger that I’ve never actually seen him act. Not a single episode of Two and a Half Men. Not one Charlie Sheen film. When I see his face, I think of a sensibility I avoid on sight: handsome, cute, smarmy—smirk plus wink. That brand of humor feels predictable and annoying. And yes, I admit the obvious contradiction: since I’ve never watched him, I can’t swear the schtick is real. Call it intuition—enough to keep me away.

    What did reach me was the public meltdown—what I remember as the “Tiger Blood Tour”—where addiction didn’t deliver humility but its opposite: bluster so loud it became a punchline. 

    So out of mild curiosity I watched the two-episode docuseries aka Charlie Sheen, and left neither admiring nor loathing him. Mostly, I felt sad—for him and for his family—because he seemed to have no guardrails, no one capable of stopping the wrecking ball before it knocked down everyone nearby.

    The most disturbing part isn’t Sheen; it’s the swarm. The morally bankrupt enablers, the sycophants, the fans who latch onto his fame and power as he self-destructs. At peak collapse they fed on the trainwreck like zombies on a buffet line, dressing in his party uniform, cheering as he staggered on and off private jets, becoming an intoxicated parody of himself. Love? Concern? Not in evidence. The meltdown was entertainment—an addictive feast for empty lives. My biggest challenge watching wasn’t parsing Sheen; it was resisting misanthropy.

    There is, thankfully, a pulse of humanity. Sean Penn, a childhood friend, offers wise, sobering context about Sheen’s volatility; so do Terry Todd and Sheen’s older brother Ramon Estevez. But watching Sheen narrate himself from a diner in Hawthorne, California is only partially satisfying. The charm flickers, the unease shows, yet the self-analysis feels shallow—short on the rigorous introspection required to grapple with the demons that keep derailing him.

    I left with the sense that his family and friends have been doing the heavy lifting for years—like he hasn’t had one life coach but several dozen—while he sits in a booth, reminiscing about the agony of being an artistic genius with impulses mere mortals can’t grasp. Whatever sobriety he’s achieved, he still reads as weakened and impoverished by the same consuming egotism that keeps baring its fangs.

  • Eternal Embarrassment

    Eternal Embarrassment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

    The Garage Door Incident and the Fight with Balrog

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Pumpkin Pants and the Stolen Nectar

    Pumpkin Pants and the Stolen Nectar

    Last night I dreamed my dresser had a secret tier for magical pants—trousers that could rewind age, inject vitality, and reboot my identity on command. I slipped into a pair of pumpkin-orange linen specials and, poof, a mastiff materialized: a melancholy titan who brightened under my hand and wilted the moment I stopped petting him, like a living barometer for attention.

    I conjured my brother to act as the dog’s surrogate owner—someone to manage the mastiff’s emotional weather—then set off on a quest for the nectar of the gods. My route was wonderfully bureaucratic: I walked into a museum, stepped into a glass case of Roman centurions, and revived one. Together we climbed Mount Olympus and stole the gods’ food—a heist movie scored by thunder. The soldier, alabaster white and eternally pleased with himself, proved cocky, selfish, and deeply agenda-driven.

    We returned from Olympus, bounty in tow, and stopped by a beach picnic where my friends were sprawled across blankets. That’s when the centurion confessed he’d hidden the nectar, claiming it was reserved for “the people God had planned,” which apparently did not include my friends. We argued—he with smug fatalism, me with wounded entitlement. If anyone had earned a sip of immortality, surely the guy in magic pants who resurrected marble and burgled Olympus had.

    My plan was simple: share the nectar, dazzle my friends, and be canonized as the man with enchanted trousers, a mystical mastiff, and a knack for raising statues from the dead before shopping the divine pantry. It was less generosity than PR. But my uncooperative companion killed the campaign. By hoarding the nectar, he blocked my ascent in the friend-group hierarchy and forced an unflattering verdict: no elevation for me—just a man in orange linen, standing next to a sulking dog and an even sulkier demigod.

  • Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    Paul Bunyan Meets the Chainsaw in Freshman Comp

    During the Fall Semester of 2024, the English Department had one of those “brown bag” sessions—an optional gathering where instructors actually show up because the topic is like a flashing red light on the education highway. This particular crisis-in-the-making? AI. Would writing tools that millions were embracing at exponential speed render our job obsolete? The room was packed with nervous, coffee-chugging professors, myself included, all bracing for a Pandora’s box of AI-fueled dilemmas. They tossed scenario after scenario at us, and the existential angst was palpable.

    First up: What do you do when a foreign language student submits an essay written in their native tongue, then let’s play translator? Is it cheating? Does the term “English Department” even make sense anymore when our Los Angeles campus sounds like a United Nations general assembly? Are we teaching “English,” or are we, more accurately, teaching “the writing process” to people of many languages with AI now tagging along as a co-author?

    Next came the AI Tsunami, a term we all seemed to embrace with a mix of dread and resignation. What do we do when we’ve reached the point that 90% of the essays we receive are peppered with AI speak so robotic it sounds like Siri decided to write a term paper? We were all skeptical about AI detectors—about as reliable as a fortune teller reading tea leaves. I shared my go-to strategy: Instead of accusing a student of cheating (because who has time for that drama?), I simply leave a comment, dripping with professional distaste: “Your essay reeks of AI-generated pablum. I’m giving it a D because I cannot, in good conscience, grade this higher. If you’d like to rewrite it with actual human effort, be my guest.” The room nodded in approval.

    But here’s the thing: The real existential crisis hit when we realized that the hardworking, honest students are busting their butts for B’s, while the tech-savvy slackers are gaming the system, walking away with A’s by running their bland prose through the AI carwash. The room buzzed with a strange mixture of outrage and surrender—because let’s be honest, at least the grammar and spelling errors are nearly extinct.

    Our dean, ever the Zen master in a room full of jittery academics, calmly suggested that maybe—just maybe—we should incorporate personal reflection into our assignments. His idea? By having students spill a bit of their authentic thoughts onto the page, we could then compare those raw musings to their more polished, suspect, possibly ChatGPT-assisted essays. A clever idea. It’s harder to fake authenticity than to parrot a thesis on The Great Gatsby.

    I nodded thoughtfully, though with a rising sense of dread. How exactly was I supposed to integrate “personal reflections” into a syllabus built around the holy trinity of argumentation, counterarguments, and research? I teach composition and critical thinking, not a creative writing seminar for tortured souls. My job isn’t to sift through essays about existential crises or romantic disasters disguised as epiphanies. It’s to teach students how to build a coherent argument and take down a counterpoint without resorting to tired platitudes. Reflection has its place—but preferably somewhere far from my grading pile.

    Still, I had to admit the dean was on to something. If I didn’t get ahead of this, I’d end up buried under an avalanche of soul-searching essays that somehow all lead to a revelation about “balance in life.” I needed time to mull this over, to figure out how personal writing could serve my course objectives without turning it into group therapy on paper.

    But before I could even start strategizing, the Brown Bag session was over. I gathered my notes, bracing myself for the inevitable flood of “personal growth narratives” waiting for me next semester. 

    As I walked out of that meeting, I had a new writing prompt simmering in my head for my students: “Write an argumentative essay exploring how AI platforms like ChatGPT will reshape education. Project how these technologies might be used in the future and consider the ethical lines that AI use blurs. Should we embrace AI as a tool, or do we need hard rules to curb its misuse? Address academic integrity, critical thinking, and whether AI widens or narrows the education gap.”

    When I got home later that day, in a fit of efficiency, I stuffed my car with a mountain of e-waste—ancient laptops, decrepit tablets, and cell phones that could double as paperweights—and headed to the City of Torrance E-Waste Drive. The line of cars stretched for what seemed like miles, all of us dutifully purging our electronic skeletons to make room for the latest AI-compatible toys. As I waited, I tuned into a podcast with Mark Cuban chatting with Bill Maher, and Cuban was adamant: AI will never be regulated because it’s America’s golden goose for global dominance. And there I was, sitting in a snaking line of vehicles, all of us unwitting soldiers in the tech wars, dumping our outdated gadgets like a 21st-century arms race.

    As I edged closer to the dumpster, I imagined ripping open my shirt to reveal a Captain America emblem beneath, fully embracing the ridiculousness of it all. This wasn’t just teaching anymore—it was a revolution. And if I was going to lead it, I’d need to be like Moses descending from Mt. Sinai, armed with the Tablets of AI Laws. Without these laws, I’d be as helpless as a fish flopping on a dry riverbank. To face the coming storm unprepared wasn’t just unwise; it was professional malpractice. My survival depended on it.

    I thought I had outsmarted AI, like some literary Rambo armed with signal phrases, textual analysis, and in-text citations as my guerrilla tactics. ChatGPT couldn’t handle that level of academic sophistication, right? Wrong. One month later, the machine rolled up offering full signal phrase service like some overachieving valet at the Essay Ritz. That defense crumbled faster than a house of cards in a wind tunnel.

    Okay, I thought, I’ll outmaneuver it with source currency. ChatGPT didn’t do recent articles—perfect! I’d make my students cite cutting-edge research. Surely, that would stump the AI. Nope. Faster than you can say “breaking news,” ChatGPT was pulling up the latest articles like a know-it-all librarian with Wi-Fi in their brain.

    Every time I tried to pin it down, the AI just flexed and swelled, like some mutant Hulk fed on electricity and hubris. I was the noble natural bodybuilder, forged by sweat, discipline, and oceans of egg whites. ChatGPT? It was the juiced-up monster, marinated in digital steroids and algorithmic growth hormones. I’d strain to add ten pounds to my academic bench press; ChatGPT would casually slap on 500 and knock out reps while checking its reflection. I was a relic frozen on the dais, oil-slicked and flexing, while the AI steamrolled past me in the race for writing dominance.

    That’s when the obvious landed like a kettlebell on my chest: I wasn’t going to beat ChatGPT. It wasn’t a bug to patch or a fad to outlast—it was an evolutionary leap, a quantum steroid shot to the act of writing itself. So I stopped swinging at it. Instead, I strapped a saddle on the beast and started steering, learning to use its brute force as my tool instead of my rival.

    It reminded me of a childhood cartoon about Paul Bunyan, the original muscle god with an axe the size of a telephone pole. Then came the chainsaw. There was a contest: man versus machine. Paul roared and hacked, but the chainsaw shredded the forest into submission. The crowd went home knowing the age of the axe was dead. Likewise, the sprawling forest of language has a new lumberjack—and I look pathetic trying to keep up, like a guy standing on Hawthorne Boulevard with a toothbrush, vowing to scrub clean every city block from Lawndale to Palos Verdes.