Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • If You Spend Your Life Wanting Things, You Will be in a Constant Fever

    If You Spend Your Life Wanting Things, You Will be in a Constant Fever

    One evening, I was holed up in my room, devouring a muscle magazine like it was scripture. I’d just finished an article on “progressive resistance training,” a phrase that made my adolescent heart thump with moral clarity. The world, I decided, was divided into two kinds of people: those who were progressing—pushing, grinding, improving—and those who were stuck, rotting in the swamps of inertia. Naturally, I placed myself in the first camp, the self-anointed pilgrim of progress.

    When the article ended, I drifted into the ads—the sacred appendix of every muscle mag. Protein powders, chrome dumbbells, pulleys, powders, potions—alchemy for the ambitious. But one ad stopped me cold: the Bullworker. A gleaming, three-foot rod of plastic and steel with cables sprouting from its sides like mechanical tendons. When you pulled the cables, the thing bowed like a crossbow for Hercules. A shirtless bodybuilder—pecs like carved mahogany—was using it to crush air itself. Price tag: forty-five bucks. Steep, but wasn’t self-transformation always costly?

    I marched into the living room, magazine in hand. My father sat in his recliner, beer in one hand, football roaring from the TV like an angry god.
    “Dad, what do you think?” I said, pointing to the Bullworker.

    He barely glanced at it. Still had the infantryman haircut, the square jaw, the tattoo—MICHAEL, bold and blue—across his right bicep like a relic from some forgotten war.
    “You want big muscles?” he said. “Pull weeds. Mow the lawn. Clean the gutters. Chop some kindling. That should do it.”

    “Dad, come on, I’m serious. This would be great for my workouts.”

    He sighed, studied the ad, then set the magazine down.
    “Son, this is marketing dressed up as science. But if you want to waste your allowance, go ahead.”

    “I’m short on cash.”

    “Then save. But make sure you want it. Do your research. My guess? The more you learn, the less you’ll want it.”

    “Why do you say that?”

    He smirked. “You ever heard of Sturgeon’s Law?”

    “No.”

    “Ninety-nine percent of everything is bullshit. Including that. Remember that martial arts course you bought? The one that promised black-belt skills in six weeks? What did you get? Stick figures in a pamphlet. Bullshit. Perform your due diligence, son. It’ll save you money.”

    “What’s ‘due diligence’?”

    “It means don’t be a sucker. Look closely before you buy anything. Most things collapse under scrutiny. Always be eager to save your money and reluctant to spend it. You hear me?”

    “Yes, Dad.”

    I retreated to my room, unimpressed by football and existentially wounded by paternal pragmatism. I opened another magazine and, in a desperate act of spiritual outsourcing, asked Master Po—my imaginary monk mentor—what he thought.

    “Your father is right, Grasshopper,” he said, somewhere between my conscience and my guilt. “If you spend your life wanting things, you will stay forever busy saving for them—and it will not be a noble busyness. It will be the feverish pacing of a man hypnotized by catalogs. Simplify your life, Grasshopper, and do the work that needs to be done.”

    “And what work is that?” I asked.

    “To stop pretending the world owes you the front of the line,” he said. “Stand at the back. Wait your turn. While you wait, develop yourself. Earn your place.”

    “How long will that take?”

    “A lifetime, Grasshopper,” he said. “And when you think you’ve arrived, the journey will have only begun.”

  • Thou Shalt Not Measure Thy Goodness Against Fools

    Thou Shalt Not Measure Thy Goodness Against Fools

    In eighth grade, Erika Jenkins was every boy’s favorite target—a tall, freckled volleyball player with legs that seemed to go on for miles and a face that couldn’t hide her fear. The boys called her Horse, Giraffe, Hyena, Zebra—an entire menagerie of cruelty. Every morning she had to walk the gauntlet from her locker to the corridor, clutching her books to her chest like a shield, her eyes darting from side to side as if she were trying to survive a nature documentary. She looked like someone bracing for an attack, because she was.

    Then summer arrived—and performed a miracle. Her grandmother took her on a Caribbean cruise, and somewhere between the turquoise waves and the buffet line, Erika Jenkins molted. When she returned that fall, she was unrecognizable. The boys at Canyon High buzzed with talk of “The Caribbean Transformation.”

    At lunch on the first day, she made her debut. Gone was the awkward, lanky girl. In her place stood someone who could have walked off a shampoo commercial. She wore a sleeveless white linen dress that caught the light, her tan skin glowing like toasted sugar. Her once-flat hair now tumbled over her shoulders in glossy brown waves. Her limbs, once all elbows and knees, now belonged to a young woman who had grown into herself.

    The same boys who had brayed at her like hyenas now worshiped her like pilgrims before a shrine. They tripped over themselves to compliment her, their awe soon sliding into the same loutish cruelty—just with a new vocabulary. The tone changed from mockery to hunger, but the malice was the same. By October, Erika Jenkins vanished—transferred, rumor had it, to a small private school where maybe she could breathe.

    I was furious—but not for noble reasons. I had finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. And now she was gone, like a dream that evaporates the moment you wake.

    That night, I asked Master Po why her story hadn’t followed the script of The Ugly Duckling. “Why wasn’t there a happy ending?” I asked.

    “Because, Grasshopper,” he said, “not all fairytales are true. The boys mocked her when she was an ‘ugly duckling,’ and they mocked her again when she became a ‘beautiful swan.’ Only their weapons changed—from insult to lust. They remained prisoners of their malice. It was they, not she, who failed to evolve.”

    He said this with a sharpness I wasn’t used to. “But I never teased her,” I protested. “Not once.”

    “Do not congratulate yourself for being less vile than the wicked,” he said. “You still measured your worth by their ugliness. You did not defend her. You simply waited for your turn to possess her beauty. Her radiance blinded them—and you as well.”

    “Are you saying I’m no better than they are?”

    “I am saying,” Master Po said, “that even a moth believes itself noble until it burns in the flame. I can already see you falling from the sky.”

    He was right, of course. My heartbreak wasn’t about Erika’s suffering—it was about my own loss. I didn’t mourn her pain. I mourned my missed opportunity to bask in her glow. Even in my sympathy, I was self-absorbed. Master Po saw the rot beneath my pity.

    He always did.

  • Thou Shall Not Skip Gravity Day

    Thou Shall Not Skip Gravity Day

    When I was fourteen, I read in The San Francisco Chronicle that the future of humanity was apparently doomed to unfold inside a giant space terrarium. The article, steeped in optimism and mild insanity, described how overpopulation and resource depletion would eventually force us to evacuate Earth aboard lunar shuttles and live in “closed-ecology habitats in free orbit.” The prophet of this plan was Princeton physicist Gerard K. O’Neill, whose forthcoming book The High Frontier promised solar-powered utopias floating blissfully through the void.

    The paper ran lush illustrations by Don Davis: rolling green hills, placid lakes, couples in flowing white linen strolling past solar panels, all living in a pastel Garden of Eden. But something about those inhabitants unsettled me. They all looked frail—thin, pale, gravity-deprived stick figures with the musculature of boiled linguine. That’s when the horror struck me: in space, there would be no gyms. No dumbbells. No pumping up. No gravity—no gains. My future would be a floating hell of atrophied muscles and existential despair. The very thought made my biceps twitch in protest.

    At the same time, a girl at school named Jennifer slipped me a birthday card with hearts on the envelope. Inside, she’d written that she liked me and wanted me to ask her out. But how could I ask her out when civilization was on the brink of being exiled to a zero-gravity tofu colony? What was the point of romance when dumbbells were about to become obsolete?

    I tore up the card, retreated to my room, and did what any hormonally charged doomsday philosopher would do: I consulted Master Po.
    “Master Po,” I said, “how can I go on living if bodybuilding dies in orbit?”
    “Grasshopper,” he said, “you live too much for yourself. You must empty yourself of self-interest.”
    “But I’m obsessed with myself.”
    “Exactly. And it shows in your quest to make your body beautiful.”
    “But bodybuilding is my life.”
    “And that,” he said, “is your curse. You train your body but let residue accumulate in your soul.”
    “So I should quit working out?”
    “Not quit. But see your body as not belonging to you. It is part of something larger.”
    “You mean, like the universe?”
    “Yes, Grasshopper. The body of the world.”
    “So, what—you want me to start picking up trash on the freeway? That’s your cosmic wisdom?”
    “Once again,” he sighed, “you are far from The Way.”

    I looked at my reflection in the mirror that night—fourteen years old, terrified of zero gravity—and realized that maybe Master Po was right. I wasn’t afraid of space. I was afraid of floating away from myself.

  • Thou Shall Not Confuse Franco Columbu with Thyself

    Thou Shall Not Confuse Franco Columbu with Thyself

    One sluggish afternoon at Canyon High, as Mrs. Hanson’s freshman English class shuffled into their desks and prepared to feign interest in Romeo and Juliet, I had something far more compelling on my desk: Pumping Iron. It was my sacred text, my adolescent scripture, filled with black-and-white photos of demi-gods flexing under the Californian sun. My favorite shot was of Mr. Universe Franco Columbu, hanging upside down from a chin-up bar like a bat carved from granite.

    Next to me sat Jill Swanson—tall, sleek, with the effortless grace of a swimmer and the smile of someone who had never sweated through a protein fart. I decided this was my moment. I turned the page toward her.
    “Hey,” I said, “check out this bodybuilder at the beach.”
    She leaned in. “Holy smokes, he’s huge.”
    I nodded solemnly. “That’s me.”
    She blinked. “What?”
    “That’s me. Can’t you tell?”
    Jill squinted at the photograph, studying the Herculean Italian upside down in all his vascular glory.
    “Oh my God,” she said slowly. “That’s you?”
    “Yep.”
    And just like that, I was Franco Columbu. I spun a whole mythology—how I’d been visiting my grandparents in L.A., hanging out with my “bodybuilding friends” in Venice, when a photographer captured me mid-workout.

    For five glorious minutes, I was a god among freshmen. Then, as Jill flipped back to her notes and I basked in the afterglow of deceit, the truth curdled in my gut. The lie that had inflated me like a balloon was already leaking air. By the time I got home, I felt hollow and cheap. I stared into the bathroom mirror, splashed cold water on my face, and summoned my inner monk.

    “Master Po,” I said, “why am I such a compulsive liar?”
    “Because, Grasshopper,” he replied, “you wish to appear strong because you are weak. True strength is not forged in muscle but in mastering your inner demons.”
    “I have only one?”
    “No,” he said, “but let’s start with the demon of inadequacy—the one that makes you trade truth for applause.”
    “How do I kill it?”
    “You don’t,” he said. “You chip away at it. Great acts are made of small deeds. Each honest act is a strike against the demon.”
    “But where do I start?”
    “Stop gazing at your reflection as though it’s a sculpture to be admired,” he said. “When you cease to worship yourself, you’ll stop fearing imperfection. The sage who puts himself last finds nourishment. You, Grasshopper, are still starving.”

    I looked at my reflection—small, soft, and decidedly un-Franco-like—and realized Master Po was right. The hardest muscle to build is the one that keeps you honest.

  • Thou Shalt Find Beauty in Freakishness—or Die Trying

    Thou Shalt Find Beauty in Freakishness—or Die Trying

    By high school, I had fully accepted that I was not designed for the mainstream assembly line. Master Po—the blind sage from Kung Fu—had become my imaginary spiritual adviser, reminding me that I was a misfit, “a brooding soul misaligned with this world.” I wore that label like a second skin. While the cool kids air-guitared to Aerosmith and Led Zeppelin, I was hypnotized by the twelve-minute prog-rock epics of Yes, King Crimson, The Strawbs, and Genesis—bands that required liner notes and a calculator to appreciate.

    Football was for the square-jawed; I preferred curling iron plates in the garage, sculpting myself into a protein-powered statue of misplaced purpose. Worse, I wasn’t just eccentric—I was evangelical. At parties, I arrived armed with Genesis LPs, a blender, and the self-righteous zeal of a macrobiotic missionary. While everyone else chugged beer, I lectured them on amino acid assimilation. “Beer tastes like horse piss!” I declared, mid-flex, clutching a protein shake like a chalice. Girls scattered like pigeons from a lawn sprinkler. “Come back!” I shouted after them. “I’m the only one here with abs!”

    Later, alone in my room, my biceps and I sulked together under the blue glow of my bedside lamp.
    “Master Po,” I sighed, “why am I such a freak?”
    “Because you throw banana peels in people’s path to keep them from getting close to you,” he said.
    “And why would I do that?”
    “To protect yourself.”
    “From what?”
    “Everyone is broken, Grasshopper—but you are cracked to the core. Yet remember: beauty can be found even in freakishness. If you don’t draw that beauty out, it will turn inward and destroy you.”
    “How so?”
    “Because if you keep throwing banana peels for others, you’ll eventually slip on them yourself.”
    I sighed. “I think it’s already happened.”

  • Your Tears Won’t Change the World

    Your Tears Won’t Change the World

    When I was thirteen, I decided the path to popularity ran straight through Soul Train. I spent months studying the dance troupe Captain Crunch and the Funky Bunch, who could pivot from the robotic precision of the Funky Robot to doing splits so fast you’d think they were animated. I practiced every night in front of my bedroom mirror until my limbs clicked like clockwork and my expression was as vacant as a mannequin’s. I was ready to unleash my Funky Robot at the Earl Warren Junior High dance.

    The playlist that night was pure chaos. Whoever the DJ was, he seemed to be drawing songs from a hat. “Free Bird” dragged like a eulogy, “Walk This Way” felt like cardiac arrest, and “Midnight at the Oasis” was exactly what it sounded like—a languid romp in the desert. But when Stevie Wonder’s “Living for the City” came on, I sprang into motion. My body jerked and popped with righteous purpose. I was a mechanical deity in Adidas, a human jukebox powered by insecurity.

    By some miracle of social physics, I ended up dancing all night with Cheryl Atkins—the prettiest girl there—because her boyfriend Rick hated to dance. While we funked and twirled under the mirrored ball, I noticed the misfits pressed against the gym walls like condemned prisoners. They’d ask for dances, get shot down, and limp back to their corner of despair. Watching them, I felt an unexpected pang—an ache sharper than any muscle burn.

    Meanwhile, the popular eighth-graders were perfecting a ritual called “getting wasted,” which apparently involved puking and maintaining high social standing at the same time. As a Junior Olympic weightlifter, I found this baffling. I could clean and jerk my body weight, but I couldn’t comprehend how vomiting could make you cool.

    By the end of the night, Cheryl and I won the dance contest. Vice Principal Gillis handed me a trophy, but instead of basking in my Funky Robot glory, I felt hollow. The faces of the wallflowers haunted me. That night, I dreamed of a beach where a giant elephant seal handed each lonely misfit a beautiful radio, and as they tuned it, they glowed and vanished into the horizon. I woke up certain of one thing: radios were holy.

    “Master Po,” I said, “the world is cruel. I can’t be happy knowing people like those misfits suffer.”
    “Spare me your tears, Grasshopper,” he said. “Sadness feels noble, but it’s an addiction. It comforts the ego while changing nothing.”
    “But what can I do?” I asked. “Darwin was right—the strong thrive, and the weak pay the price.”
    “Indeed,” he said. “And in case you haven’t noticed, you’re one of the weak. So tend your own garden, Grasshopper. The misfit must save himself before he can save the world.”

  • Do Not Trust the Smile of the Sea

    Do Not Trust the Smile of the Sea

    When I was twelve, my family lived briefly in Nairobi, where my father worked for the Peace Corps. One school break, we headed to Mombasa, the coastal jewel of Kenya, where the Indian Ocean was as warm as bathwater and clear enough to read your reflection in. Leopard-spotted shells glimmered beneath the surface, and purple sea urchins decorated the shallows like jeweled land mines. I was a sunburned boy in blue terry-cloth trunks printed with white lilies—half Tarzan, half tourist—determined to conquer nature with curiosity alone.

    At low tide, I discovered sea cucumbers: bulbous, indecently soft things that looked like props from a B-movie. I picked one up and chased my younger brother along the beach, brandishing it like a medieval mace, laughing so hard I forgot to breathe. Then, mid-laughter, the ocean answered back. I fell into the shallow surf, and my back erupted in white-hot agony. My father sprinted toward me, wielding a stick like an exorcist, shouting that I’d been wrapped by a Portuguese Man o’ War. By the time he peeled the translucent tentacles off my skin, the jellyfish had already written its signature in fire across my spine.

    A local doctor, somber and leathery from the sun, told us a five-year-old boy had died from the same sting just a week earlier. He handed me pain medication and ordered a long, cold bath. As I soaked, trembling and pink, I asked Master Po why the most beautiful place I’d ever seen had tried to kill me.

    “Grasshopper,” he said, “Heaven and Earth show no mercy. You thought yourself Tarzan, but you are a fragile boy—a straw dog—easily crushed by nature’s indifference. Do not be deceived by beauty. It will destroy you.”

    “I’m not fooled,” I said, “but I still want to be close to it. Surfers in Santa Cruz watch their best friend get swallowed by a great white, and a year later they’re back in the same waves. Tomorrow my brother and I will be back in the Indian Ocean. Are we fools?”

    “Foolishness,” Master Po said, “is closing your eyes to the lesson and calling it courage. Tomorrow, you may return to the sea—but this time, you’ll keep your eyes open.”

  • The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

    The Path to Enlightenment Is Paved with Horse Dung

    After sixth grade let out, the bus would drop us on Crow Canyon Road, and my friends and I would stumble across the street to 7-Eleven for a Slurpee before the long, lung-searing climb up Greenridge Road. One hot spring afternoon, as I stood under the humming fluorescent lights, brain half-frozen by cherry ice and “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” pouring from the store radio, two blonde sisters drifted in like mirages from a Beach Boys song. They were the Horsefault sisters—freckled, sunburned, and perilously beautiful, with high cheekbones and figures that looked imported from a drive-in double feature starring Raquel Welch and Adrienne Barbeau.

    “Wanna see our rabbit?” they asked.

    Normally, my interest in rabbits was zero, caged or otherwise. But I was eleven, and the sisters had the sort of gravitational pull that makes a boy agree to anything. So I said yes.

    We walked a dirt path behind the 7-Eleven, through a field glazed in golden light and peppered with horse droppings that crunched underfoot. Their farmhouse loomed ahead, half hidden behind a thicket of bushes. And there it was: the cage. A huge metal pen with its door cracked open, a thick chain dangling like a warning.

    “There,” one of them said.

    I peered inside. No rabbit. Just straw, shadows, and the faint smell of hay and mischief. Then came the cackling—witchlike, gleeful—as the sisters lunged, grabbing my arms and trying to shove me into the cage. It dawned on me that I was living a low-budget horror film: The Boy Who Should Have Stayed at 7-Eleven.

    They tugged; I resisted. Dust rose around us like smoke as we wrestled in the grass, the air thick with sweat, laughter, and the unmistakable scent of adolescence gone rogue. Chickens screamed from a nearby coop as if alerting the countryside to my peril. Then, mid-grapple, something shifted: the danger took on a strange sweetness. The idea of being locked in that cage suddenly didn’t seem so terrifying. In fact, it sounded… educational.

    But the Horsefault sisters, realizing I was enjoying this little apocalypse of innocence too much, let go. We stood, panting, brushing hay from our shirts like dazed gladiators. Without a word, they turned toward the farmhouse, and I trudged home, confused, awakened, and very much alive.

    That night, I couldn’t sleep. My body was staging a mutiny.

    “Master Po,” I whispered to the ceiling. “I seem to have a new affliction. It’s keeping me up.”

    “Your body,” came his serene voice, “is prey to desire. Do not despair. You are becoming one with nature. You should be happy.”

    “Happy? I’m miserable.”

    “To hide your desire gives it power,” he said.

    “Believe me, it’s not hidden.”

    “Excellent. Desire is both a blessing and a burden.”

    “What’s the good news?”

    “It means you’re alive and growing.”

    “And the bad news?”

    “It never ends.”

    I frowned at the ceiling. “Master Po?”

    “Yes, Grasshopper?”

    “I wish I hadn’t fought them off. I wish I were in that cage right now.”

    “It’s too late. What’s done is done. Learn from it. In time you’ll understand your desire instead of fearing it.”

    “What if there’s no future for me in that department?”

    “You’re eleven,” he said dryly. “Your future is nothing but departments.”

    “Peace seems impossible.”

    “Remember, Grasshopper,” he said, fading into the dark, “the light that burns twice as bright burns half as long.”

    “Then I must be radioactive,” I muttered, staring at the ceiling, waiting for peace—or the Horsefault sisters—to return.

  • Your Status Drifts Like the Waves of the Sea

    Your Status Drifts Like the Waves of the Sea

    One grim Tuesday in fifth grade, our entire class was herded into the nurse’s office for the Ishihara Colorblind Test—a bright little carnival of humiliation disguised as medical science. Each of us took turns peering into a glowing lens, where we were supposed to spot numbers hidden in a mosaic of pastel dots. My classmates breezed through like they were decoding divine messages. I, however, saw nothing but decorative oatmeal.

    The nurse grew impatient. “Can’t you see anything?” she barked, her voice slicing through the sterile air like a paper cut. The class erupted in laughter. My fate was sealed: I was the day’s designated leper, the monochrome freak in a Technicolor world.

    At lunch, I sat alone with my half-eaten cheeseburger and tater tots, brooding over my sudden fall from grace. “Why,” I asked my internal life coach, Master Po, “is everyone making such a big deal about me being colorblind?”

    “Do not worry, Grasshopper,” he said in that maddeningly tranquil voice. “Today you are mocked, but by tomorrow you will be first picked at kickball, for your mighty legs will send the ball over the fence. People’s judgments are like waves upon the sea—brief, noisy, and forgotten.”

    “I’m not so sure about that,” I said. “Teddy Leidecker smelled like pee in kindergarten, and he’s still called Pee-pee Teddy. That wave’s been breaking for five years straight.”

    “Nature does not hurry,” Master Po said serenely, “yet everything is accomplished in its time.”

    “Try telling that to Teddy Leidecker,” I muttered.

    “You must not manage the gardens of others,” he said. “You have your own plot of weeds to clear.”

    “Really encouraging, Master.”

    He nodded. “You must clear them to reveal your original nature.”

    “What if my ‘original nature’ isn’t that great?”

    “Even if you dislike yourself,” he said, “you must nurture yourself. The sage helps even the repulsive.”

    “So what you’re saying,” I said, “is that even when I do stupid things, I can be a moral lesson to myself?”

    “Precisely, Grasshopper. You are blossoming before my eyes.”

    “Yeah,” I said, stabbing a tater tot. “Into what, exactly—a dandelion?”

  • Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    Do Not Assume There Is a Bridge Between Life and Death

    When I was ten, I made the catastrophic decision to watch an ABC Movie of the Week called The Screaming Woman, based on a Ray Bradbury short story. The premise was simple: a woman buried alive, screaming for help. But to a ten-year-old with an overactive imagination, it was psychological napalm. For two weeks I couldn’t sleep. Every creak of the floorboards, every gust of wind was the muffled plea of a mud-caked corpse clawing her way out from under my bed.

    One night, trembling in a sweat-damp cocoon of sheets, I turned to my imaginary Zen tormentor, Master Po, and asked, “Why am I so stupid, Master? Why did I watch a movie designed to murder my sleep?”

    “Ah, Grasshopper,” he said, with the unhurried calm of someone who’s never paid a utility bill, “the woman buried in a shallow grave is not your enemy. She is your teacher. She shows you the short bridge between life and death. You imagine the bridge as long, but in truth it is a nub, barely the length of a thought. Horror films remind you that you are always one bad turn from the dirt nap.”

    “That’s profound, Master, but I still can’t sleep.”

    “You mustn’t flee from the woman under your bed,” he said. “You must reach into the grave and pull her out. In saving her, you save yourself.”

    “I’m not going near a grave,” I said. “I have claustrophobia.”

    “Life and death,” he replied, “are the same thing seen from opposite sides of the same coin.”

    “I prefer the life side, thank you.”

    “You cling to your vantage point because you think it’s fixed,” he said, with the patience of a man lecturing a doorknob. “But it will shift. When you accept change, death will no longer frighten you—and once that fear is gone, nothing can stop you.”

    “Nothing? Like I could hit a baseball five hundred feet like Reggie Jackson?”

    Master Po sighed. “No, Grasshopper. You will stop wanting to be Reggie Jackson. And that will be your home run.”