Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • Hugh Hefner’s Watchbox from Hell

    Hugh Hefner’s Watchbox from Hell

    Chapter Three from The Watch Whisperer of Redondo Beach


    When I got home, I collapsed into a dream-heavy sleep—the kind you don’t choose but fall into like a trapdoor.

    I dreamed I was back with the Watch Master, only this time we were in a cave—his new lair, apparently—where flickering monitors lined the stone walls like cursed flat-screens. Each displayed a parallel universe, a version of me shaped entirely by my watch collection.

    One screen showed me with a massive, vulgar collection: gold bezels, diamond indices, stainless steel bracelets so chunky they could anchor a yacht. In that reality, I was obese. Bloated. A Las Vegas lounge lizard with a double chin, a sprayed-on tan, and a wig styled into a pompadour so high it had its own zip code. A gold-plated microphone dangled from my sweaty fingers as I crooned like Elvis, Tom Jones, and Michael Bolton—simultaneously. Around my neck: ropes of gold. On my wrist: a diamond-studded Rolex that practically screamed for an exorcism.

    When I opened my mouth to speak, no words came out—just a guttural, distorted sound, like a demon gargling battery acid. I had abandoned my family. I lived in a velvet-curtained grotto that looked like Hefner’s afterlife man-cave. I wasn’t just a parody of myself. I was a possession.

    That’s when I woke up—slick with sweat, lungs full of dread. But the nightmare wasn’t over. I could still feel him—it—the beast version of me, 300 pounds of ego and regret, pressing down on my mattress. The sag was real. I swear it. My bed bowed like I was hosting a sumo wrestler from the spirit world.

    Later that night, I sat at the Watch Master’s kitchen table and told him the whole thing while he sipped from a chipped mug under the soft glow of moonlight. His gaunt face lit up with delight. He laughed—not cruelly, but knowingly.

    “Textbook,” he said. “You’re a classic case. A fractured soul, split by overexposure to bezel lust. Watch addiction creates avatars. You’ve conjured a grotesque mirror of your worst impulses. The doppelgänger is real, and he’s hungry.”

    “What do I do?” I asked, sounding more like a haunted child than a man who once justified paying four figures for a dive watch he never actually dove with.

    The Master leaned back and cracked his neck like a man preparing to file a warranty claim on your soul. “You ever hear the saying, ‘You’ve got to go to hell before you get to heaven?’”

    I nodded.

    “Well,” he said, rising slowly, “That’s where you are. Right on schedule.”

    “Can you be more specific?”

    “Later. Right now, just hearing your dream has worn me out. It’s not just the nightmare—it’s you. Your whole aura is exhausting. You radiate crisis. Come back tomorrow, same time. We’ll discuss logistics.”

    And just like that, he disappeared down a hallway, leaving me with my own haunted watch box, and the question of whether I was still awake—or just in a deeper layer of the dream.

  • The Watch Potency Principle and the Man Who Couldn’t Count to Eight

    The Watch Potency Principle and the Man Who Couldn’t Count to Eight

    Chapter 2 from The Timepiece Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    The Watch Master accepted my Venmo transfer—five grand, no questions asked. He nodded like a monk receiving an offering, commending me for “putting my money where my mouth is,” as if throwing cash at the problem proved I was spiritually ready to shed my horological demons. Then he sent me home with a single directive: return the next night with all seven of my watches arranged in one box for evaluation.

    At precisely 10 p.m., under a bloated moon that cast an eerie glow across the red roof tiles of his dilapidated Redondo Beach bungalow, I stood in his living room. The Master’s pale, angular face looked freshly excavated from a tomb. He gestured for the box.

    He opened it. Seven divers—six Seikos and a lonely Citizen—gleamed under the yellowed light of a hanging stained-glass lamp.

    “Good,” he said, scanning the collection with the intensity of a mortician identifying a corpse. “All divers. That shows thematic restraint. You’re not a complete degenerate.”

    He picked up each Seiko, held it to his eye like a jeweler, then scoffed. “You baby these. When’s the last time you actually swam? Clinton administration?”

    He chuckled at his own joke, which I pretended not to hear.

    His bony fingers closed around the Citizen. “Hmm. Titanium case and bracelet. The others are all on straps. This inconsistency must be clawing at your OCD like a raccoon under drywall.”

    I nodded.

    “Sell it,” he said flatly. “It’s feeding your misery.”

    “But what about the Seiko Astron I’ve been eyeing? That one has a titanium bracelet too.”

    “Yes. And that’s not the least of your problems.” He sipped his black coffee—no cream, no joy. “You’re teetering on the edge of a collecting abyss. The Citizen’s already rotting your center. Add one more watch, and your soul will be lost to cluttered mediocrity.”

    “But the Astron—it’s beautiful,” I protested.

    “Of course it is,” he said, shrugging. “So is opium. Doesn’t mean you should buy a kilo.”

    I tried to recover. “It’s the Watch Potency Principle, right? The more watches you own, the more you dilute the power of each one.”

    He looked up sharply. “So you have read my work. Then why can’t you live by it? You recite the commandments, but break them before sunrise. Your brain and behavior are locked in bitter divorce.”

    “I just need a plan,” I said. “What do I do?”

    “Purge,” he said, as if uttering a sacred mantra.

    “Purge?”

    “Start with the titanium Citizen. Shed that one, then we’ll talk next steps.”

    “Our next move?”

    He sighed, pinched the bridge of his nose. “You’re exhausting. Come back tomorrow at ten sharp. And for God’s sake, don’t buy anything in the meantime.”

  • No One Gets Out of Here Alive

    No One Gets Out of Here Alive

    Chapter 1 of the Timepiece Whisperer of Redondo Beach

    Late one night, I found myself piloting my car through the hushed streets of Redondo Beach, past manicured lawns and hedges trimmed with neurosis, until I arrived at the blight in paradise: a hulking, lichen-tinged Victorian heap that looked like it had been shipped in from Transylvania on a dare. This was the home of the Watch Master—a reclusive oracle to the chronometrically cursed, a man whispered about in collector circles the way children whisper about the Boogeyman.

    The Master was once a studio guitarist in the ’70s, back when coke was a food group and solos could last nine minutes. He’d since traded fretboards for bezels, amassing a fortune in wrist candy—most of it gifted by rock gods in states of manic gratitude. Yet despite his vault of horological riches, he wore only a battered G-Shock Square with a scratched acrylic face that looked like it had survived a tour in Fallujah. He wore it like a monk wears a hair shirt.

    He answered the door barefoot, his jeans collapsing around his ankles like they’d given up. A Led Zeppelin shirt sagged off his wiry frame, and his hair, silver and stubborn, was pulled back from a gleaming bald crown. His beard was a frizzled thicket, somewhere between Rasputin and an abandoned Brillo pad.

    “What’s your problem?” he asked, voice rough as gravel and just as warm.

    I didn’t flinch. “I own seven watches. That’s my limit. Any more and I spiral. Emotional collapse, obsessive thoughts, buyer’s remorse, the whole circus. But I saw a Seiko Astron—the blue-dial SSJ013J1—and now I need it. Crave it. Is there any way to prepare my psyche for an eighth watch without descending into madness?”

    He stared at me like I’d just asked if I could take up recreational black tar heroin “responsibly.”

    “You’re asking how to rationalize a relapse,” he said. “That’s like asking if there’s a polite way to punch yourself in the throat.”

    And with that, he opened the door wider and let me in.

    The Watch Master squinted at me through the porch light haze, as if sizing up a man who’d brought his own shackles and wanted help tightening them. He scratched his beard, winced like my  question had given him tinnitus, and finally spoke:

    “So let me get this straight. You’ve reached your personal watch ceiling—seven tickers, your magic number, your horological emotional support grid. And now you want to blow a hole in the hull with a satellite-synced Seiko spaceship that tells time in Tokyo, Toledo, and the twelfth ring of Saturn. And you’re asking me how to prepare your psyche for this?”

    He stepped back into the house and waved me in. “Come inside, pilgrim. I need a drink before I answer that.”

    Once in the dark-paneled den, surrounded by velvet paintings of Hendrix and a lava lamp that looked clinically depressed, he continued:

    “You don’t need an eighth watch. You need a spiritual bypass. The Seiko Astron isn’t a timepiece. It’s a cry for help dressed in sapphire crystal. You’re not telling time—you’re telling yourself a story: that the right watch will rescue you from restlessness. You’re like a man trying to fix a leaky roof with a diamond-encrusted hammer. Beautiful tool, wrong job.”

    He leaned in. “So if you must buy it, do this first: Write a eulogy for the peace of mind you once had at seven watches. Light a candle. Say goodbye to balance. Then hit ‘add to cart.’ And remember: when the remorse creeps in—and it will—just whisper to yourself what we all know in this house of horological horrors: No one gets out of here alive.”

    I repeated the Watch Master’s words, “No one gets out of here alive.” Then I said, “I was told you could help me with my problem. All I’m asking is that you help prepare my psyche for an eighth watch. I want you to help me prepare for this Seiko Astron as an Exit Watch. I heard you could do this for me. I had assurances. I gave you five hundred dollars. I was expecting more than a scolding.”

    The Watch Master squinted at me through a cloud of sandalwood incense, scratched his sun-damaged scalp, and said:

    “Five hundred dollars gets you a scolding. A thousand gets you a metaphor. If you want catharsis, enlightenment, and a stable seven-watch rotation, you’re looking at premium pricing. And as for an Exit Watch?” —he let out a low chuckle— “That’s like asking a bourbon addict for one last glass to sober up.”

    He leaned closer, the scratched G-Shock catching a glint of porch light. “You don’t want an Exit Watch. You want absolution. And I don’t do sacraments—I do timekeeping.”

    “So you want more money.”

    “Of course. The five hundred was for the privilege to just see me. If you want an Exit Watch, that will cost you.”

    “The Astron is close to two grand.”

    “Peanuts. If you want to close this deal, pay me five grand, and I’ll make your troubles go away.”

    I was desperate. “Venmo or Paypal,” I said.

    “Now we’re talking.”

  • Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Recycling in the Shadow of the End Times

    Last night, my wife asked me to handle a sacred domestic rite of passage: haul a trunk-load of obsolete electronics to the Gaffey S.A.F.E. Recycle Collection Center in San Pedro. “They open at 9 a.m.,” she said, which is code for: Don’t sleep in.

    So I dutifully loaded my Honda Accord with a hall of shame—old radios, half-dead fans, ghosted iPads, prehistoric laptops, orphaned computer speakers, a humidifier that wheezed its last breath in 2018, and enough acid-leaking batteries to qualify as a small environmental disaster.

    By morning, I punched the address into my phone, merged onto the 110 South, and exited Pacific Avenue, driving through an industrial no-man’s-land of rusting warehouses, improvised shelters, and overgrown brush—a Stephen King set piece waiting to happen. After bouncing over railroad tracks and veering onto a gravel path flanked by nothing but dirt and faint regret, I arrived at 8:50.

    The “facility” was a glorified tarp tent squatting in front of a cinder-block warehouse. A small line of cars idled ahead of me like penitents outside a confessional. Signs warned against dumping poisons, spoiled crops, medical waste, firearms, and, refreshingly, detonation materials of any kind. A second sign warned against exiting your vehicle, eating, or drinking—because apparently the mere whiff of your lukewarm coffee might trigger a chemical reaction that could incinerate the South Bay.

    At one point, a confused driver from Washington state cut in front, realized he was in the wrong dystopian checkpoint, U-turned, and peeled off down the gravel road, leaving a dust plume that coated our windshields like nuclear ash.

    By nine o’clock, two dozen cars were idling behind me in what now resembled the opening act of an eco-thriller. A cheerful woman in an orange vest began making her rounds, clipboard in hand. She asked what I was dropping off, and I gave her the rundown—my sad parade of malfunctioning tech. I suspect her job was twofold: confirm I wasn’t smuggling Chernobyl-grade waste, and quietly profile whether I looked like the kind of guy who dumps bodies with his broken humidifiers. Somewhere nearby, I imagined, there was a man with a headset and a sidearm watching from a repurposed FEMA trailer.

    Finally, I popped the trunk. Uniformed workers retrieved my gadgets with grim efficiency. I thanked them. They returned my gratitude like seasoned pallbearers—calm, practiced, unfazed.

    Unburdened, I pulled away from the hazmat drive-thru, feeling 50 pounds lighter and slightly radioactive. I had fulfilled my civic duty to both my marriage and the planet.

  • The Tech Lord and the Gospel of Obsolescence

    The Tech Lord and the Gospel of Obsolescence

    Last night I dreamed I was helping my daughter with her homework in the middle of a public square. A chaotic, bustling arena. Think Roman forum meets tech dystopia. We had two laptops perched on a white concrete ledge high above a stadium of descending steps, as if we were doing calculus on the lip of a coliseum.

    The computers were a mess—two laptops yoked together like resentful twins, their settings morphing by the second. Screens flashed blue, then white, then black. Sometimes yellow cartoon ducks floated lazily across the bottom like deranged pop-up ads from a children’s game. I wasn’t so much solving her homework as performing tech triage on possessed machines.

    I wasn’t panicked because I couldn’t help her. I was panicked because someone might see that I couldn’t help her. Vanity, thy name is Dad.

    People walked past, utterly unfazed. Apparently, homework over a stadium chasm with dueling laptops and malfunctioning duck animations was standard urban behavior.

    Then a young man—a peripheral character from some former life—told me there was a “tech lord” nearby. Not tech support. A tech lord. Naturally, I followed.

    The tech lord’s lair was a dim room centered around a massive table, cathedral-like in tone and purpose. He was listening to the Bible—read aloud by the famous comedian George Carlin. Not a solemn voice or trained narrator, but someone best known for punchlines and pratfalls. And the tech lord was rapt. He cradled a thick, black Bible like a sacred talisman, proclaiming that this was the finest biblical performance art ever conceived.

    I tried to get in a word about my tech problem, but he interrupted me and asked me what my favorite book in the Bible was. I said the Book of Job, of course. He seemed satisfied with my response and allowed me to continue with my inquiry. 

    When I mentioned the malfunctioning laptops, he waved it off like someone refusing to answer a question about taxes. “You’ll need to get rid of both machines,” he intoned, “and buy a new one.”

    Naturally, I flirted with the idea of going full Apple—titanium chic, smug perfection—but quickly sobered up. Apple or Windows, it’s the same headache in a different tuxedo. I settled for a sleek black Windows laptop, and with a sudden, magical poof, there it was in my hands. The new device of promise. The Messiah machine.

    I returned to my daughter, still huddled over her rebellious duo. I tried to shut them down, ceremonially, like a general dismissing insubordinate troops. They refused. The screens flared defiantly. They would not go quietly into obsolescence. They had become conscious, bitter, undead.

    And then I woke up.

    The kicker? Just before bed, my wife gave me a task: drive 30 minutes to San Pedro with a car full of broken electronics and deliver them to an e-waste center. My subconscious, clearly, had feelings about this and delivered me this dream as a prelude to my task.

    One final note about the dream: the pairing of George Carlin and the Bible triggered a memory of a dream I had in the early ’90s. In that dream, the Messiah wasn’t a robed figure of spiritual gravity—he was Buddy Hackett, the goofy-faced, gravel-voiced comic best known for squinting through punchlines. There he was, standing atop a Hollywood hotel, delivering what I could only assume was divine revelation—or maybe just the world’s strangest stand-up set. I couldn’t tell if he was inspired, intoxicated, or both.

    Now, three decades later, George Carlin shows up in a dream to read Scripture aloud with messianic intensity, joining Hackett in a growing pantheon of prophetic clowns. It makes a strange kind of sense. Both comedians and prophets stand at the edge of civilization, pointing fingers at the absurdities we refuse to question. They use hyperbole, irony, and parable to slice through the world’s lazy thinking. The difference? Prophets get canonized. Comedians get heckled.

    But maybe, just maybe, it’s the same job with a different mic.s a prelude to my task.

  • The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    The Loneliness Loop: Meghan Daum and the Limits of Solitude

    I’m working my way through The Catastrophe Hour, Meghan Daum’s latest collection of personal essays. Now in her mid-fifties, Daum is unapologetically single and childless by design, having long ago decided that marriage and parenting weren’t roles she could convincingly—or willingly—perform. Much of her work is a dispatch from the front lines of solitude. And she’s damn good at it.

    What Daum does better than most is forge an instant intimacy with her reader. Her essays feel like front porch conversations at dusk—no performance, no agenda, just two adults quietly deconstructing the wreckage of modern life. Her voice evokes the same soulful, offhand brilliance I admire in Sigrid Nunez’s novels: smart without pretense, vulnerable without begging.

    But by the halfway mark, the essays begin to blur. There’s a tonal and thematic sameness that settles in—like the ambient hum of a refrigerator you only notice when it stops. The introspective loop tightens. The sharp lens that once turned mundane moments into epiphanies starts to feel like someone narrating their week out loud after too many days alone.

    There’s the grief over dead dogs. The endless parsing of domestic minutiae. The architectural dream house that never quite materializes. And those fragmented, overstimulated city-life encounters that feel less like essays and more like repurposed Substack entries. It’s not that these topics lack merit—it’s that, in aggregate, they start to feel like what happens when no one interrupts you for too long.

    Now, I say this as a card-carrying member of the Navel-Gazers Guild. I recognize the signs. I know the thrill of dissecting one’s inner weather systems for an imaginary audience. So I don’t say this to judge Daum, but to observe that the limitations of a fully interior life—however self-aware—do begin to show.

    Still, dismissing Daum’s collection as mere navel-gazing would be both lazy and wrong. Her prose is laced with hard-earned wisdom and an acid wit that’s as refreshing as it is unsparing. When she hits, she hits hard—and truthfully. And that, more than novelty or plot, is why I keep turning the pages.

  • ChatGPT Killed Lacie Pound and Other Artificial Lies

    ChatGPT Killed Lacie Pound and Other Artificial Lies

    In Matteo Wong’s sharp little dispatch, “The Entire Internet Is Reverting to Beta,” he argues that AI tools like ChatGPT aren’t quite ready for daily life. Not unless your definition of “ready” includes faucets that sometimes dispense boiling water instead of cold or cars that occasionally floor the gas when you hit the brakes. It’s an apt metaphor: we’re being sold precision, but what we’re getting is unpredictability in a shiny interface.

    I was reminded of this just yesterday when ChatGPT gave me the wrong title for a Meghan Daum essay collection—an essay I had just read. I didn’t argue. You don’t correct a toaster when it burns your toast; you just sigh and start over. ChatGPT isn’t thinking. It’s a stochastic parrot with a spellchecker. Its genius is statistical, not epistemological.

    And yet people keep treating it like a digital oracle. One of my students recently declared—thanks to ChatGPT—that Lacie Pound, the protagonist of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive,” dies a “tragic death.” She doesn’t. She ends the episode in a prison cell, laughing—liberated, not lifeless. But the essay had already been turned in, the damage done, the grade in limbo.

    This sort of glitch isn’t rare. It’s not even surprising. And yet this technology is now embedded into classrooms, military systems, intelligence agencies, healthcare diagnostics—fields where hallucinations are not charming eccentricities, but potential disasters. We’re handing the scalpel to a robot that sometimes thinks the liver is in the leg.

    Why? Because we’re impatient. We crave novelty. We’re addicted to convenience. It’s the same impulse that led OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush to ignore engineers, cut corners on sub design, and plunge five people—including himself—into a carbon-fiber tomb. Rush wanted to revolutionize deep-sea tourism before the tech was seaworthy. Now he’s a cautionary tale with his own documentary.

    The stakes with AI may not involve crushing depths, but they do involve crushing volumes of misinformation. The question isn’t Can ChatGPT produce something useful? It clearly can. The real question is: Can it be trusted to do so reliably, and at scale?

    And if not, why aren’t we demanding better? Why haven’t tech companies built in rigorous self-vetting systems—a kind of epistemological fail-safe? If an AI can generate pages of text in seconds, can’t it also cross-reference a fact before confidently inventing a fictional death? Shouldn’t we be layering safety nets? Or have we already accepted the lie that speed is better than accuracy, that beta is good enough?

    Are we building tools that enhance our thinking, or are we building dependencies that quietly dismantle it?

  • The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    The Gold and Purple Pyramids at the Gates of Heaven

    Last night, I dreamed I lived in heaven—and like most people blessed beyond comprehension, I had absolutely no idea.

    The dream began in a hectic classroom, as these things often do. I was teaching at a strange college campus. The students were more postgrad in their maturity and engagement than freshman—mature, sharp, and fully caffeinated on the joy of learning.

    We were deep in discussion, when I glanced out the window and saw rain falling in soft sheets. I drifted, just for a second, and in that brief lapse, the class was commandeered—gracefully—by one of my more opinionated students, Tim Miller, moonlighting as a podcaster and self-appointed co-professor.

    Tim, without missing a beat, told everyone to take out the assigned blue textbook. The expensive one. The one I myself had never read. I looked at the book with the guilt of a host who’s never tasted his own hors d’oeuvres. Trying to recover, I asked what they thought. They said it was “okay”—the academic kiss of death. I nodded solemnly and was mercifully saved by the end of class.

    I looked at the exit and saw a nearsighted colleague half my age pushing a fleet of book carts. I offered to help. He kindly accepted my offer—but by the time I reached the carts, he had finished everything himself. He waved goodbye, like a benevolent young professor who didn’t need me after all.

    As I walked through the corridor, I spotted something. A green coffee mug I’d abandoned earlier on a table, shimmering like a forgotten relic. I scooped it up and raced across campus in the rain, placing it delicately on the windowsill of the library. Two librarians emerged, eyes wide with wonder, as if I’d returned the Ark of the Covenant. They smiled as if I’d done something sacred.

    Onward. The rain kept falling, warm and tropical, more blessing than burden. I reached for my phone–the same emerald green as the coffee mug–now coated in fine beach sand. I frantically wiped it clean, restoring it to its gleaming perfection.

    I wasn’t driving. I never did. I preferred walking the five miles home, savoring the trek. In the distance, my residence came into view: three mountain-sized pyramids rising into the mist, woven from purple and gold stone, arranged in a mesmerizing zigzag pattern. I’d always loved purple—no surprise there—but for the first time, I saw the gold properly. I normally detest gold. Too garish. But this gold? This gold was alive. Deep, radiant, humming with mystery.

    I realized, with a kind of thudding wonder, that I lived there. Among the pyramids. In the mist. In heaven. And somehow, until that moment, I’d never truly seen it.

    Then I woke up, soaked not in rain but contrition, and wondered: How much of my real life do I miss by failing to see what’s already shimmering around me? What marvels have I demoted to the mundane? What if heaven isn’t a destination but a perception we keep forgetting to use?

  • Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    Botoxed Sphinx Cats and Other Body Dysmorphia Fables

    In the early ’90s, I had a student whose entire identity was shackled to the number on a stadiometer. I don’t recall the exact figure, but he was somewhere south of five-foot-five—a detail that tormented him like a Greek curse. What I do remember is that he was a strikingly handsome kid. Slender, well-proportioned, with the kind of face you’d expect to see in a Calvin Klein ad, not in a therapy session about height insecurity. But none of that mattered. He couldn’t see past the measuring tape in his head.

    It was during one of our writing lab sessions—those clattering dens of early-’90s Macintoshes, all beige and humming, where I played roving editor and motivational coach—that he confided in me. Class was winding down, students trickling out like post-cardio gym rats, and this nineteen-year-old lingered behind with something heavy to unload.

    He told me that being short felt like a life sentence. But the real damage, he confessed, came not from his height—but from the manic overcompensation it inspired. When talking in groups, he’d find the highest available perch to stand on—benches, stairs, anything to give him the illusion of height. He wore shoe lifts, which he kept hidden in his closet like a box of shame. But worst of all? He trained himself to walk perpetually on his tiptoes.

    Yes, tiptoes. Every day, every step. As if sneaking through life as a burglar of inches.

    Eventually, his spine cried uncle. The tiptoe act wrecked his back, forced him into surgery, and—here’s the gut punch—cost him an entire inch. In his effort to stretch himself, he ended up shorter. He admitted he hated himself for it, and I believed him.

    Looking at him—this good-looking, intelligent kid—it struck me just how dangerous our internal narratives can be. We live so much in our heads that our perception becomes more powerful than reality. A stray comment in middle school morphs into a life-defining trauma. A mirror becomes a courtroom. And the verdict? Never good enough.

    His story is a tragic little parable of body dysmorphia: how the seeds of insecurity, if left unchecked, sprout into weeds that choke reason, and in our desperate attempts to “fix” ourselves, we often end up disfiguring what was never broken.

    Our bodies are our canvases. And oh, how savagely the world critiques them. Some of us starve. Some inject ourselves with synthetic youth. Some spend fortunes on surgeries that leave us looking like Botoxed sphinx cats. And some, like my student, ruin their spines to gain half an inch that no one but they ever noticed.

    We’re all vulnerable to the feedback loop. When I’m lean and muscular on YouTube, the algorithm sings. I get compliments. DMs. Admiring questions about my training and my “age-defying” lifestyle. When I’m twenty pounds heavier? Crickets. I become one more bloated has-been talking into the void.

    Yes, our bodies are our canvas. But if we’re not careful, our efforts to “improve” that canvas can become self-mutilation masquerading as self-love.

  • Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem

    Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem

    In fourth grade at Anderson Elementary in San Jose, our teacher cracked open Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and unleashed a literary sugar bomb on the classroom. The characters didn’t just leap off the page—they kicked down the door of our imaginations and set up shop. The book hijacked our brains. Good luck checking it out from the library—there was a waiting list that stretched into eternity.

    A year later, the film Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory hit theaters, but my parents, apparently operating under some moral suspicion of Hollywood whimsy, refused to take me. I wouldn’t see it until the VHS era, when cultural consensus finally upgraded it to “beloved classic” status. That’s when I met Gene Wilder’s Wonka—equal parts sorcerer, satirist, and deranged uncle.

    The best moment? Easy. He hobbles out, leaning on a cane like a relic of Victorian fragility—then suddenly drops the act, executes a flawless somersault, and stands up with a gleam that says, I know exactly what game I’m playing, and so should you. That glint in his eye, equal parts wonder and judgment, has haunted me for decades. His entire persona is a velvet-gloved slap to the smug, the spoiled, and the blissfully ignorant. He isn’t just testing children—he’s taking society’s moral pulse and finding a weak, sugary beat.

    That gleam stayed with me. So much so that I wrote a piano piece inspired by Wilder’s performance. I called it Gene Wilder’s Prelude to Mischief and Mayhem. The first movement was a nightmare—rewritten more times than I care to admit. Oddly, the second and third movements came first, composed together in the aftermath of my mother’s passing on October 1, 2020. Nearly five years later, I finally completed the first movement, like some strange reverse birth.

    The result? A tribute in three acts to the sly grin, the righteous mischief, and the bittersweet brilliance of Gene Wilder—a man who, like the best artists, never let kindness become cowardice or magic become a mask for mediocrity.