Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • The Rearview Great White

    The Rearview Great White

    This morning I drove my daughter and her friend from Torrance to Knott’s Berry Farm, a forty-minute journey that included the usual Southern California ritual of surrendering a portion of one’s life to the freeway.

    On the 91 East, I settled into the diamond lane and soon acquired a companion: a pearl-white Toyota Grand Highlander attached to my rear bumper.

    He stayed there for roughly twelve miles.

    I wasn’t crawling. The driver simply wanted to go faster, and apparently the laws of physics required that he communicate this desire by positioning several thousand pounds of Toyota close enough to inspect the stitching on my back seat.

    About five miles before the Beach Boulevard exit, traffic began slowing. I soon saw why. Two lanes to my right was a California Highway Patrol cruiser.

    Everyone underwent the customary freeway conversion.

    Brake lights appeared.

    Speedometers suddenly became objects of intense scholarly interest.

    Drivers who had been doing eighty-five seconds earlier discovered within themselves a deep and previously unsuspected commitment to public safety.

    The Grand Highlander, however, had apparently missed the announcement.

    He illegally crossed out of the diamond lane, accelerated past me, and continued charging ahead.

    I watched with fascination.

    Surely he’ll see the CHP.

    He didn’t.

    Surely he’ll slow down.

    He didn’t.

    Then he passed the patrol car.

    The CHP officer noticed him immediately.

    The cruiser pulled out.

    It moved behind the Highlander.

    And at that moment, the entire psychological structure of the freeway changed.

    The Highlander hit the brakes.

    Too late.

    The lights came on.

    This is what I call The Rearview Great White: that primitive surge of terror you experience when a police cruiser appears behind you with its lights flashing and you realize, after several desperate seconds of denial, that you are the intended meal.

    There is always that brief period of bargaining.

    Maybe he’s after somebody else.

    You change lanes.

    He changes lanes.

    Maybe he needs me to move aside.

    You move farther right.

    He follows.

    The fin is circling.

    Imagine swimming a hundred yards offshore at Redondo Beach and seeing the dorsal fin of a great white shark rise from the water behind you.

    That’s close enough.

    The Highlander driver, who moments earlier had been exercising dominion over the 91 Freeway, was now prey.

    I expected to feel some schadenfreude.

    I didn’t.

    Partly because I’ve driven more aggressively than I should have myself. Moral superiority becomes difficult when the prosecution has access to your own driving record.

    More importantly, I didn’t think his behavior quite deserved the emotional death penalty.

    On my personal Aggression Scale, I’d give him a six.

    Annoying? Absolutely.

    Reckless? Certainly.

    But I’ve seen eights and nines—the true freeway psychopaths who cross four lanes at ninety miles an hour as though auditioning for a role in Grand Theft Auto: Gardena.

    Had the Highlander been an eight, I might have enjoyed watching the CHP cruiser descend upon him like divine judgment.

    At six, I mostly felt sorry for him.

    I told my passengers that the poor guy was probably hyperventilating.

    Because seeing the lights is only the beginning.

    Now you have to pull over.

    This sounds easy until your nervous system has reverted to that of a gazelle being pursued across the Serengeti. You must find a safe location, activate the turn signal, change lanes, slow down, and demonstrate to the officer that you’re a stable citizen rather than someone about to flee the country.

    Then comes the roadside personality transformation.

    The aggressive driver disappears.

    The tailgater disappears.

    The man who fifteen seconds earlier regarded traffic laws as suggestions issued by lesser men is gone.

    In his place appears the most agreeable citizen in California.

    “Yes, Officer.”

    “Absolutely, Officer.”

    “Of course, Officer.”

    Meanwhile, his shirt is soaked through. His back is glued to the seat. His heart is trying to escape through his sternum.

    The Highlander followed the CHP cruiser down the offramp toward Knott’s Berry Farm, and I continued on my way.

    No triumph.

    No fist pump.

    Just sympathy for a man who had spent twelve miles imagining himself the predator.

    Then he looked in his rearview mirror.

    And saw the fin.

  • Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    Why I Need to Craft “Natty” Wring Prompts

    About fifteen years ago, one of my students wrote a personal narrative about losing herself. She was in middle school. Her friends persuaded her to dress in extremely suggestive clothing with tons of makeup. In a revealing outfit that would have caused her mother to have a brain hemorrhage, she looked in the mirror and started crying. “I didn’t even recognize the girl staring back at me,” she wrote. “I wiped the makeup off, got back in my regular clothes, ran home, and cried in bed.” 

    I thought about that image as I started working on some writing prompts for the Fall Semester in which my eighteen-year-old college freshmen contrast writing with AI and writing “natty,” to use an expression that describes “natural” bodybuilders who don’t take performance-enhancing drugs. Generative AI can be a great writing tool, but it tends to overdo everything. Our writing becomes that crying overdone girl staring back at herself, or the bloated bodybuilder who is more cartoon than a celebration of the physique. In all of that generative AI, something gets lost. 

    Us. 

    We can hardly be blamed. Generative AI can feel like magic, taking a 300-word idea and blowing it up into a 2,000-word essay with vivid descriptions, highly stylized metaphors and witticisms, and Socratic rhetorical flourish. Eventually, we begin to believe we are the source of that 2,000-word essay. We flatter ourselves to our own detriment. We lose authenticity. We lose ourselves. We are that middle school girl staring into the mirror and not recognizing who’s looking back at us. 

    Using AI tools with my students for the last four years, I can say from personal experience that writing natty feels cleansing, like going off sugar-laden processed foods. Just as too much dessert causes diabetes of the body, too much generative AI causes diabetes of the mind and soul. We need to carve out natural writing spaces where we can connect with who we truly are before it’s too late. 

  • The Vanity Portal

    The Vanity Portal

    I have learned that something good can occasionally crawl out of an embarrassing place.

    For years, I have entertained a recurring fantasy so vainglorious that merely describing it makes me want to hide under a table. Yet somewhere inside this monument to my own magnificence, I discovered what I call The Vanity Portal: the strange passage through which a fantasy of being admired unexpectedly opens onto a sincere desire to become good.

    The fantasy takes me back to 1983. I am twenty years old again, working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, where I actually worked while attending college. But fantasy has renovated the premises. The wine bar now sits conveniently beside a grand piano, because apparently my unconscious has obtained an unlimited remodeling budget.

    I am not merely an employee.

    I am the entertainment.

    I even have a stage name:

    Lachyrmose.

    There is a ritual to my appearances.

    I am in the beer box, tearing apart cardboard cartons and doing the grubby work of a liquor-store employee, while customers at the wine bar begin demanding music.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    I make them wait.

    “Lachyrmose!”

    Eventually I emerge from the beer box looking like a survivor of industrial combat. Shreds of cardboard cling to my clothes. A sharp carton has scratched my face. My arms bear little cuts and bruises. I am exhausted.

    This is crucial to the fantasy.

    I cannot simply be a gifted pianist. That would be insufficiently magnificent. I must also be a working-class hero who has just finished wrestling cases of beer before casually sitting down at a grand piano and revealing the soul of Rachmaninoff.

    The customers grow quiet.

    Lachyrmose begins to play.

    Melancholy music fills the wine bar.

    On one particularly ambitious occasion, Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett happen to be sitting among the customers. They are staying at the nearby Claremont Hotel and have wandered into Jackson’s for a little wine and relaxation.

    Naturally, they are astonished.

    Who is this young man?

    Minutes ago he was dismantling beer cartons. Now he is producing music of heartbreaking beauty with a completely formed artistic voice. Gabriel and Hackett exchange glances. They understand immediately that they have stumbled upon some rare creature—a bruised liquor-store employee with the soul of a European composer.

    At this point the fantasy has become so narcissistic that it should probably require a permit.

    But then someone else enters it.

    A homeless woman.

    Unlike Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett, she comes from an actual memory.

    I remember seeing her near Jackson’s wearing a red wig she had apparently found in a dumpster. She stood before the reflective glass of a newspaper rack, admiring herself in her new acquisition. The wig was garish and artificial, but she looked at her reflection with pleasure. For a moment, this discarded object had given her something beautiful.

    In my fantasy, she joins the customers at the wine bar.

    I begin playing.

    She listens for a while and then falls asleep.

    The melancholy piano music washes over her as she dozes in her ridiculous red wig. Peter Gabriel listens. Steve Hackett listens. The wine drinkers listen. But gradually they cease to matter.

    When the recital ends, the woman wakes.

    She thanks me for the music.

    I give her a bag filled with deli sandwiches to take with her.

    Of course Gabriel and Hackett witness this too. My unconscious is not yet willing to surrender the production entirely. They were already impressed by my piano playing; now they discover that Lachyrmose is also a humanitarian.

    Apparently musical genius wasn’t enough.

    I required sainthood.

    But then the fantasy changes.

    The woman thanks me for the recital and the sandwiches, and I tell her that no thanks are necessary.

    It was an honor to play for her.

    And I mean it.

    That is the moment when I pass through The Vanity Portal.

    Something strange happens. The fantasy stops being entirely about admiration. Peter Gabriel disappears. Steve Hackett disappears. The wine bar disappears. Even Lachyrmose begins to disappear.

    There is only the woman in the red wig.

    And I love her.

    Not romantically. Not sentimentally. I feel an overwhelming tenderness toward this forgotten person who possesses nothing, who found a discarded wig and briefly admired herself in the glass of a newspaper rack.

    In the fantasy, I tell her that playing for her was an honor.

    But the tears aren’t imaginary.

    I am actually sitting at my piano, playing music and crying.

    This is what disturbs me about the fantasy and prevents me from dismissing it as mere narcissistic theater.

    I struggle with Christianity. I struggle with its doctrines, its claims about salvation, its diagnosis of the human condition, and the enormous theological machinery built around Jesus. I can argue with all of it.

    But in that moment at the piano, I experience something I can only describe as the love of Jesus.

    Not doctrine.

    Not theology.

    An impulse.

    The desire to look upon someone whom the world barely sees and regard serving her not as charity but as an honor.

    And suddenly my ridiculous fantasy has shown me something I didn’t know was there.

    I want to be good.

    I want a pure heart.

    Unfortunately, even my fantasy of purity arrives contaminated by vanity. I cannot simply feed a homeless woman. Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett must be sitting nearby taking notes. I cannot simply play the piano. I must emerge from the beer box bloodied by cardboard, sit before an awestruck audience, and reveal myself as Lachyrmose.

    The ego insists upon producing the show.

    But perhaps this is how The Vanity Portal works.

    We enter carrying our vanity, our fantasies, our desperate need to be admired. We imagine ourselves beautiful, talented, heroic, compassionate. The entire production may be absurd.

    Then, somewhere inside the performance, something genuine appears.

    The fantasy begins:

    Look at me.

    But if we’re fortunate, somewhere along the way another voice emerges:

    Look at her.

    And for a moment, we do.

  • Autobiographical Time Lag

    Autobiographical Time Lag

    I am obsessed with accurate watches. I own radio-controlled G-Shocks that communicate with atomic clocks in the middle of the night, correcting themselves so that I don’t have to endure the indignity of being three seconds late to nowhere. I put them near windows to improve reception, check whether they synchronized overnight, and derive absurd satisfaction from knowing that the watch on my wrist agrees with official time down to the second.

    Yet I’ve recently discovered an embarrassing irony: while my watches keep nearly perfect time, the clock inside my head is hopelessly slow. Ask me how long I’ve been teaching, lifting weights, trying to write books, or engaging in any of my other lifelong enterprises, and I routinely misplace entire decades. My G-Shock may be off by half a second. My autobiographical clock is off by twenty years.

    This discrepancy recently surfaced in a dream about my friend Adam, whom I’ve known since 1998, when he took my college writing class. Adam went on to build a successful career in advertising and branding, married, had a daughter, and now works from home. Perhaps because of his professional expertise, my dreaming mind decided that Adam was precisely the man to stage an intervention.

    With my retirement approaching, he apparently concluded that my malfunctioning internal clock required professional attention. He took me to an office specializing in something I didn’t know existed: the rebranding of human beings.

    I was immediately suspicious.

    “Rebranding” is one of those words that makes me reach instinctively for my wallet. I imagined consultants with expensive eyeglasses explaining that retirement represented an exciting opportunity to “reimagine my personal narrative” while helping me establish an Instagram presence in which I would pose beside cappuccinos and announce that sixty-five was the new forty-five.

    No thanks.

    But the woman assigned to me wasn’t like that.

    She was maternal, down-to-earth, dressed in jeans and a football jersey. No power suit. No TED Talk headset. No laminated diagram explaining My Journey. She had the reassuring manner of someone who might help you change a tire and then send you home with a casserole.

    She explained that retirement required more than leaving my job.

    I had to reinvent myself.

    Worse, I had to rebrand myself.

    I prepared to resist, but something about her practical manner disarmed me. Fine. Ask your questions.

    She began with the basics.

    How old was I?

    How many years had I been teaching?

    How long had I been trying to write novels?

    How many years had I been trying to lose weight?

    How long had I been lifting weights?

    Easy questions.

    Except I got nearly every answer wrong.

    Not slightly wrong.

    I was shaving decades off my life.

    “How long have you been teaching writing?”

    “About twenty years.”

    She looked at her records.

    “Forty.”

    Oh.

    Next question.

    “How long have you been lifting weights?”

    “Forty years.”

    Another glance at the paperwork.

    “Fifty-four.”

    Excuse me?

    Apparently I had begun lifting weights sometime during the Nixon administration and simply neglected to update my internal records.

    The interrogation continued.

    Every number I produced was suspiciously flattering. Years disappeared from my career. Decades vanished from my ambitions. Entire geological periods evaporated from my biography.

    I had apparently been cooking the chronological books.

    That’s when I realized I suffered from Autobiographical Time Lag: the discrepancy between one’s actual age and the age assumed by one’s interior sense of self.

    I know how old I am.

    Of course I do.

    But apparently some deeper part of my brain does not.

    That brain maintains a fraudulent set of books in which everything happened twenty years ago. I’ve been teaching for twenty years. I’ve been lifting for forty. I’ve been struggling with my weight for a while. I’ve been trying to become a writer for a reasonable amount of time.

    Then the auditor from the Department of Time arrives.

    Forty years.

    Fifty-four years.

    Decades.

    Decades.

    More decades.

    The horror of aging is partly numerical. You don’t experience yourself as a stack of calendar pages. Consciousness feels continuous. The thirteen-year-old who picked up his first weights doesn’t seem like some extinct ancestor whose bones were recently discovered beneath a shopping mall.

    He’s me.

    I can still feel him in there.

    So my brain performs an enormous act of biographical compression. It takes fifty-four years of lifting weights and somehow files them under “I’ve been doing this for a long time.”

    But fifty-four years isn’t a long time.

    It’s a civilization.

    I’ve been lifting weights longer than many of the people I work with have been alive. Presidents have come and gone. The Soviet Union collapsed. The Internet appeared. Phones became computers. Artificial intelligence began helping me write essays about how old I am.

    And through all of it, apparently, I’ve been doing curls.

    The same distortion applies to teaching. Forty years sounds preposterous. Surely I haven’t been standing in front of college writing classes for four decades.

    But I have.

    I’ve taught through chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, Canvas, online instruction, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. At this point I’m less a professor than a sedimentary record of educational technology.

    The woman in the football jersey understood something I didn’t.

    Before I could reinvent myself for retirement, I had to locate myself accurately on the map of chronological time.

    I couldn’t begin the next chapter while pretending I was halfway through the previous one.

    That, I realized, was the purpose of the strange rebranding office. They weren’t going to manufacture some shiny post-retirement identity for me. They weren’t going to turn me into Professor 2.0, complete with a podcast, personal logo, and inspirational LinkedIn posts about embracing change.

    They were performing an intervention.

    The first step wasn’t reinvention.

    It was arithmetic.

    I kept giving the woman the age of the man I felt myself to be.

    She kept giving me the age of the man who actually existed.

    And the numbers refused to negotiate.

    Perhaps that’s the strangest thing about getting older. The calendar ages with perfect accuracy, but my autobiographical clock is running slow.

  • The Volume Knob Principle

    The Volume Knob Principle

    When I returned from my family vacation on July 30, 2026, I stepped on the scale and saw 236 pounds.

    At sixty-four, that put me twenty-six pounds above my goal of 210 and six pounds above a barrier I hadn’t managed to penetrate since 2019.

    This called for action.

    Unfortunately, my preferred response to a problem is sometimes to attack it with a flamethrower.

    Within four days, I dropped to 230. Much of that was undoubtedly vacation water weight, but I was encouraged. The campaign had begun. I would eat properly, train hard, and finally break through the 230 barrier.

    Then I made the mistake of confusing enthusiasm with wisdom.

    I exercised every day for eleven consecutive days. Some days I did sixty-eight minutes of kettlebell circuit training followed by an hour on my Schwinn Airdyne. The kettlebells weren’t particularly heavy, but I kept moving. Then came the bike, where exercise ceased to be exercise and became a hostage negotiation with the calorie counter.

    My target was 700 calories.

    Not 620.

    Not 650.

    Seven hundred.

    I would climb onto the Airdyne and begin pedaling like a man attempting to power Southern California during a blackout. The fan roared. Sweat poured off me. My legs churned. I stared at the monitor as though the glowing digits were reporting my moral worth.

    All this punishment produced a fascinating result.

    I didn’t lose another pound.

    After eleven days of dietary virtue and exercise fanaticism, I still weighed 230.

    Then something worse happened.

    On the eleventh day, I got on the Airdyne and my body resigned.

    Normally I could grind my way toward 700 calories. This time I barely reached 300. My legs were empty. My energy vanished. It felt as though someone had opened a panel in my back and removed the battery.

    Fine, I thought. I’m exhausted. I’ll rest.

    I couldn’t.

    I crawled into bed physically demolished yet strangely agitated. Instead of relaxation came anxiety. I tossed and turned, frightened by the depth of my exhaustion. For most of my life, exercise had been one of my great sources of bliss. Now it had entered the Fear Dungeon. I had pushed myself hard enough that the thing I associated with vitality suddenly seemed capable of hurting me.

    I began wondering whether I had crossed some invisible line.

    Then I thought of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

    Arnold has inspired me since I was thirteen. Now in his late seventies, he reportedly still trains seven days a week for about ninety minutes: forty-five to sixty minutes of cycling followed by roughly thirty minutes of weights.

    Seven days a week.

    At nearly eighty.

    I couldn’t survive eleven.

    Was something wrong with me?

    Then, during my next kettlebell workout in the garage, I had a revelation that should have occurred to me considerably earlier.

    Arnold isn’t trying to kill Arnold.

    The older Arnold isn’t reenacting Pumping Iron every morning. He’s not storming into the gym with Wagner blasting while attempting to punish every muscle fiber for the crime of aging. His workouts appear considerably more civilized. He rides his bike. He lifts. He talks to people. He jokes. A man of immense charisma, he holds court. For Arnold, the gym is partly exercise and partly social club.

    Meanwhile, I’m alone in my garage behaving as though the Schwinn Airdyne knows where the bodies are buried.

    The difference isn’t necessarily discipline.

    It’s volume.

    I began imagining my exercise program controlled by a giant amplifier knob.

    Mine was turned to Eleven.

    Nigel Tufnel would have approved.

    Every workout had to be harder. Every bike session had to produce the magic number. Every day off looked suspiciously like weakness. If 600 calories was good, 700 was better. If four workouts were productive, eleven consecutive workouts must transform me into a Greek god sometime before Labor Day.

    Except my body wasn’t becoming a Greek god.

    It was filing a grievance.

    That’s when I arrived at The Volume Knob Principle: sustainable fitness isn’t about turning effort as high as it will go. It’s about finding the highest setting from which your body can reliably recover.

    For me, Eleven was not heroic.

    Eleven was stupid.

    So I’m turning the knob down to Seven.

    I’ll continue my kettlebell circuits because I enjoy them. But I’ll allow myself a minute of rest when I need it. I’ll trim the workouts from sixty-eight minutes to about sixty-three and limit them to three days a week.

    The Airdyne requires a more dramatic intervention.

    Getting 700 calories in under an hour was beating me up. Doing it three or four times a week was beating me up with a folding chair after I was already on the ground.

    So the bike goes down to twice a week.

    And 700 loses its throne.

    The new target is 600.

    This sounds easy until you understand the psychology of the calorie counter. Once you’ve repeatedly produced 700, anything less starts feeling like moral decline. The machine reports 600 and some primitive voice says, Pathetic. You used to be somebody.

    That voice needs to shut up.

    Six hundred isn’t a failed 700.

    Seven isn’t a failed Eleven.

    A rest day isn’t evidence of decadence.

    At sixty-four, perhaps the great fitness challenge isn’t learning how hard you can push yourself. I mastered that trick decades ago. The harder lesson is learning when pushing harder becomes indistinguishable from stupidity.

    I can’t train exactly like Arnold.

    I don’t need to.

    I can steal the more useful lesson from the older Arnold: keep moving, keep lifting, keep showing up—but stop treating every workout like the beaches of Normandy.

    Turn down the Volume Knob.

    Eleven makes more noise.

    Seven lets you keep playing.

  • The Exhaustion Paradox

    The Exhaustion Paradox

    In 1974, when I was in junior high, a friend came to school looking wrecked. He had spent the weekend at his family’s cabin skiing at Bear Valley Mountain Resort, and when he returned home Sunday night, exhausted from two days on the slopes, he couldn’t sleep.

    This made no sense to me.

    Wasn’t exhaustion supposed to produce sleep? You depleted the body, crawled into bed, and disappeared for ten hours. That was the arrangement.

    His mother, a nurse, offered a different explanation. Her son had gone beyond ordinary fatigue. He was so exhausted that his body could no longer relax enough to sleep.

    I found the idea fascinating and horrible.

    Call it The Exhaustion Paradox: the state in which fatigue becomes so acute that instead of producing relaxation and sleep, it produces agitation, anxiety, and an inability to rest. The body desperately needs the very thing its exhausted condition prevents it from obtaining.

    I filed this strange idea somewhere in my adolescent brain and didn’t think about it again for more than fifty years.

    Then I decided to recreate the experiment.

    My current weight-loss campaign has made me eager to exercise. Usually, this is a good thing. I know my body well enough to understand that I need one or two days off every week. Recovery allows my muscles to heal and lets me return to my workouts with enough energy to attack them rather than merely survive them.

    But weight-loss impatience has a way of making perfectly sensible principles seem negotiable.

    If exercise burns calories, more exercise must burn more calories. And if more is good, ten consecutive days must be magnificent.

    So I trained for ten days without a break.

    On the tenth day, I climbed onto my exercise bike and discovered that my body had apparently resigned without giving notice.

    My usual power was gone. My legs felt hollow. I produced less than half my normal output. Every pedal stroke seemed to require a committee meeting. This wasn’t the satisfying fatigue of a hard workout. I felt depleted at the cellular level, as if someone had reached inside me and removed the batteries.

    Fine, I thought. Obviously I need sleep.

    I dragged myself to bed.

    And couldn’t rest.

    Instead of sinking gratefully into the mattress, I became anxious. The exhaustion itself was unnerving. I could feel how badly my body needed recovery, yet I couldn’t cross the threshold into it. I tossed and turned for ninety minutes, simultaneously desperate for sleep and incapable of surrendering to it.

    Then a memory surfaced from 1974.

    Bear Valley.

    My junior-high friend.

    His nurse mother.

    He was too exhausted to sleep.

    Fifty-two years later, I finally understood what she meant.

    I got out of bed and told my wife what was happening. She suggested I drink some water mixed with electrolyte powder.

    I did.

    Soon I felt considerably better. Whether the electrolytes were responsible, the water helped, or simply getting out of bed broke the cycle of anxious exhaustion, I don’t know. But the feeling of physical crisis subsided. I did a few chores and eventually sat down to write.

    The episode reminded me of something I already knew but had temporarily decided didn’t apply to me: recovery is not the enemy of training.

    It is part of training.

    You cannot bully the body indefinitely and call it discipline. Eventually the distinction between training and punishment disappears. The workout deteriorates, the body rebels, and even rest becomes difficult.

    At thirteen, I thought The Exhaustion Paradox was fascinating and awful.

    At sixty-four, I can confirm the awful part.

  • The Sandwich Test

    The Sandwich Test

    Late in my sixty-fourth year, I had a dream about getting old.

    Not dying. Not disease. Not falling down the stairs and being discovered three days later by a concerned Amazon driver. The dream was about something that frightens me more: remaining perfectly alive while becoming increasingly incompatible with the world.

    I was still a college writing professor, but the college had metastasized into an enormous city. I had offices scattered across campus, although “office” was a generous term. Some of my offices were hidden inside caves. Others were buried beneath rocks. Apparently, I had been teaching composition continuously through the Cenozoic, Mesozoic, and Paleozoic eras.

    I was no longer Professor McMahon.

    I was Ancient Man.

    Students and faculty tolerated me with the peculiar tenderness people reserve for very old dogs and malfunctioning appliances they don’t quite have the heart to throw away. I was still technically employed. I still had classes to teach. I simply never made it to them.

    I was too busy looking for lunch.

    Eventually I wandered into a campus café and ordered a sandwich. Then came the moment that crystallized the entire dream.

    I didn’t know how to pay.

    Everyone else apparently understood the electronic payment system. There were screens, phones, apps, codes, invisible financial transmissions humming through the atmosphere. I stood before the cashier with the helpless expression of a Cro-Magnon man encountering an Apple Store.

    Finally, I opened my wallet.

    Inside, instead of dollar bills, was a wad of turkey cold cuts.

    This was my money.

    I handed the cashier several slices.

    She stared at them.

    Then she stared at me.

    For a moment, I could see her weighing her options: call security, summon a social worker, or simply accept that the ancient professor had reached the stage of life when deli meat constituted legal tender.

    She chose mercy.

    Suppressing her laughter, she accepted my turkey and made me a sandwich while her coworkers turned away so I wouldn’t see them shaking.

    This was The Sandwich Test: the moment when an ordinary transaction reveals that the world has quietly changed its operating system without consulting you.

    Every generation eventually takes it.

    One day you are a fully competent adult who understands how civilization works. Then you encounter a parking meter, QR code, authentication app, digital wallet, restaurant kiosk, or some other technological improvement designed to make life “easier,” and discover that apparently everyone received instructions except you.

    The young person behind the counter looks at you sympathetically.

    You reach for your wallet.

    Turkey.

    The humiliation goes deeper than technological incompetence. The Sandwich Test tells you that your currency—literal and metaphorical—is losing value.

    I had survived chalkboards, dry-erase boards, overhead projectors, PowerPoint, online teaching, Canvas, Zoom, and artificial intelligence. This longevity gave me a certain prestige. People regarded me as one might regard a giant sequoia: ancient, impressive, and probably best left exactly where he is.

    At one point I encountered Florida A&M’s magnificent Marching 100 moving across campus. I followed them.

    Their music filled me with heavenly bliss. I wasn’t supposed to interfere with their rehearsal, but nobody threw me out. Ancient Man had privileges. If an elderly professor who had apparently been teaching since the Paleozoic wanted to trail behind the marching band, you let him.

    This was the contradiction of old age. I was ridiculous but venerable, obsolete but durable, invisible but somehow legendary. People humored me precisely because I had survived long enough to become an artifact.

    Yet I didn’t feel honored.

    I felt lonely.

    I thought of the larval souls of Hades, those spectral inhabitants of the underworld who retained consciousness without fully participating in life. That was the real terror of the dream: not that my body had failed but that the world had moved several feet away from me. I could still see it, hear it, walk through it.

    I just couldn’t quite enter it.

    Then I woke up.

    My muscles were sore from the previous day’s kettlebell workout. I lay there contemplating Ancient Man, wandering through geological time with his useless wallet stuffed with lunch meat.

    Then I got out of bed and headed for the exercise bike.

    The larval state could wait another day.

  • Your Inner Thirteen-Year-Old Still Sits on the Thrown

    Your Inner Thirteen-Year-Old Still Sits on the Thrown

    Grown men like to pretend they have escaped adolescence. They acquire careers, mortgages, spouses, children, retirement accounts, cholesterol numbers, and opinions about property taxes. They learn to discuss interest rates without giggling. They attend funerals. They replace water heaters. They become, by every outward measure, adults.

    And yet somewhere inside the sixty-something man sits a thirteen-year-old boy whose hormones have just detonated.

    The boy remembers when the world fizzed like a glass of Alka-Seltzer. He remembers Eva Gabor floating onto Match Game, Adrienne Barbeau on Maude, Dahlia Lavi in Catlow, Jennifer O’Neill in Summer of ’42, Ursula Andress in Dr. No, Nancy Archer and Honey Parker in Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, and Mary Ann and Ginger on Gilligan’s Island. These women did not merely appear on television or movie screens. They altered atmospheric pressure. They made the furniture hum. They turned an ordinary Tuesday night into an annunciation.

    Half a century later, the man remembers them with an intensity he finds embarrassing.

    He should be past all this. Good God, he is in his sixties. He has accomplishments. He has experience. He has endured loss, raised children, paid bills, navigated marriage, watched his parents age, and contemplated his own mortality. Surely all this should have transformed him into that mythical creature known as the Mature Man.

    And to some extent it has.

    But not enough.

    Because deep inside him, untouched by the decades, the thirteen-year-old remains seated on his throne.

    Call it Adolescent Apotheosis: the elevation of one’s adolescent self into the supreme version of the self, the golden incarnation against which every subsequent stage of life seems slightly fraudulent. The boy is not merely remembered. He has been canonized.

    At first the man assumes this is nostalgia. But nostalgia doesn’t explain the voltage.

    Neither does sex.

    Certainly sex is involved. Let us not insult the evidence. The thirteen-year-old did not admire Adrienne Barbeau because of her comic timing.

    But what he really worships is the consciousness he possessed when he first saw these women. At thirteen, desire had arrived before disappointment had acquired tenure. The future stretched before him like an enormous amusement park whose gates had just opened. Anything might happen.

    The women became icons of this state. Eva Gabor, Jennifer O’Neill, Honey Parker, Mary Ann, Ginger, Adrienne Barbeau—stained-glass saints in the Church of Infinite Possibility.

    This is why seeing their photographs decades later can produce such disproportionate emotion. He isn’t merely looking at Adrienne Barbeau.

    He is looking through her.

    On the other side is himself at thirteen: absurd, frightened, libidinous, hopeful, ignorant, unfinished—and magnificently alive.

    The sixty-something man possesses things the boy could not imagine: maturity, competence, money, domesticity, fatherhood, knowledge. He should regard these as victories.

    And he does.

    Sort of.

    That is his shame.

    Because none of them make the world fizz.

    Sometimes he suspects that everything after adolescence has been an elaborate diplomatic mission conducted on the boy’s behalf. The adult travels through the world collecting experiences, possessions, accomplishments, and relationships, periodically returning to the palace to report his findings.

    The boy listens politely.

    “Very impressive,” he says.

    “Now tell me about Honey Parker.”

  • The Geekee Principle

    The Geekee Principle

    My first great love was not a person.

    It was a blanket.

    Its official name has long since been forgotten, but I christened it Geekee, a name that made perfect sense to a toddler and none whatsoever to anyone else. Geekee was once white satin. By the time I entered preschool, however, it had evolved into something that looked less like bedding than forensic evidence. It was stained, yellowed, threadbare, and perfumed with an aroma my parents described as “disgusting” and I regarded as the unmistakable scent of home.

    Geekee accompanied me everywhere.

    At bedtime I rubbed its frayed corners against my cheek or twisted one into my mouth, reenacting the long-forgotten comfort of infancy. Modern psychologists would probably call it a transitional object. I called it civilization.

    My parents, unfortunately, belonged to the Anti-Geekee Party.

    They insisted I was too old for it.

    “It stinks.”

    “It looks terrible.”

    “People are going to think we can’t afford another blanket.”

    They saw a filthy piece of cloth.

    I saw emotional life support.

    The debate continued until we moved from Florida to California.

    Somewhere along a lonely stretch of highway, my father executed one of the cleverest confidence schemes of my childhood.

    “Look!” he shouted through the windshield. “A baby alligator!”

    Naturally, I turned to the opposite window, searching the roadside for the tiny reptile.

    That was all the opening he needed.

    With the efficiency of a seasoned CIA operative disposing of classified documents, my father snatched Geekee from my hands, rolled down his window, and launched it into history.

    By the time I turned back around, Geekee had vanished.

    I was inconsolable.

    “Stop the car!” I screamed.

    “We have to go back!”

    My father remained perfectly calm.

    “The wind took it.”

    I refused to believe him.

    Then he delivered the lie that permanently transformed the story.

    “The baby alligator found Geekee.”

    I stopped crying.

    “He doesn’t have a mother,” my father explained. “He’s cold. He needs your blanket more than you do.”

    Children possess a remarkable willingness to believe impossible things, provided those things are morally satisfying.

    The image immediately formed in my mind: a lonely baby alligator wrapped snugly inside my beloved blanket somewhere beside the road, warm because of my sacrifice.

    My grief did not disappear.

    It changed direction.

    Instead of mourning what I had lost, I found myself quietly pleased that someone else had gained it.

    Looking back, I realize my father had stumbled upon what I now call The Geekee Principle: the recognition that we surrender our deepest childhood attachments most successfully when they are absorbed into a larger story of generosity, purpose, or love. We rarely outgrow comfort by force. We outgrow it by discovering something that matters more than our comfort.

    Simply telling me to “grow up” would have failed spectacularly.

    Children rarely surrender enchantment because adults lecture them about maturity.

    They surrender one enchantment only after being offered another.

    My father understood this instinctively.

    He did not replace Geekee with logic.

    He replaced it with compassion.

    Years later, I began noticing that adults possess their own versions of Geekee.

    Some clutch prestigious careers long after those careers have become prisons.

    Others cling to collections, political identities, social status, religious certainty, resentments, old romances, or carefully curated self-images that have ceased nourishing them years earlier.

    The object changes.

    The psychology does not.

    Every Geekee whispers the same promise:

    “Without me, you won’t be safe.”

    Sometimes it is true.

    Often it is merely familiar.

    Growth begins when we discover that the thing we cannot imagine living without may actually be preventing us from becoming the person we were meant to become.

    The tragedy is that adults rarely have fathers willing to invent baby alligators for them.

    Instead, life performs the theft itself.

    A layoff.

    A divorce.

    A diagnosis.

    A death.

    A market crash.

    The prized possession disappears through the window before we have time to tighten our grip.

    Only afterward do we ask whether the loss concealed an unexpected gift.

    I never saw Geekee again.

    Perhaps it landed in a ditch.

    Perhaps another motorist found it and wondered why someone had discarded what appeared to be the world’s saddest dishrag.

    Or perhaps, somewhere in the swamps of the Deep South, there once lived an unusually well-insulated baby alligator.

    At four years old, I believed that story completely.

    At sixty-four, I find myself believing something even stranger.

    The best lies are the ones that quietly tell the truth.

  • The Happiness Performance Principle

    The Happiness Performance Principle

    Before long I began to notice a curious couple on Facebook.

    Every single day they appeared together, smiling with such unwavering enthusiasm that they seemed less like two human beings than the official mascots of matrimonial bliss. Their grins possessed the tensile strength of industrial adhesives. Their faces radiated enough saccharine cheerfulness to put the greeting-card industry out of business. Every photograph announced the same message:

    Look how happy we are.

    A few years ago, I barely noticed them.

    Now I brace myself.

    Their daily appearances have become as predictable as sunrise and almost as obligatory. Every scroll through Facebook feels like waiting for a television commercial whose dialogue you already know by heart.

    I want to be fair to them.

    For all I know, they are generous friends, devoted parents, faithful spouses, and decent human beings. I would hate to commit the very sin social media encourages: reducing an entire person to a single online habit.

    Yet habits have consequences.

    When someone repeatedly performs happiness before an audience, the performance eventually overwhelms the happiness itself.

    The smiles stop looking spontaneous.

    They begin looking contractual.

    What once appeared joyful gradually acquires the unsettling atmosphere of a hostage video filmed inside a Pottery Barn catalog.

    The more insistently they proclaim their happiness, the more I find myself wondering what invisible anxiety demands such relentless reassurance.

    That reaction says as much about the audience as it does about the performers.

    Human beings possess surprisingly sensitive authenticity detectors. We do not expect perpetual happiness because we have never met anyone who actually lives that way. Real marriages contain grocery lists, bad moods, unpaid bills, stomach flu, arguments over thermostats, and long stretches of ordinary Tuesdays. They breathe.

    Curated happiness does not.

    It smiles.

    Constantly.

    The phenomenon illustrates what I call The Happiness Performance Principle: the tendency for repeated public displays of happiness to become progressively less convincing, eventually suggesting the insecurity they were meant to conceal.

    This does not mean the couple is secretly miserable.

    It means the performance has become louder than the reality.

    Paradoxically, genuine happiness rarely feels compelled to advertise itself. It is too busy living. It has no quarterly reporting requirements. It does not wake each morning asking, How can we reassure strangers that our marriage remains delightful?

    Incessant documentation changes the nature of the experience itself. The camera quietly becomes a third partner in the relationship. Every lunch, vacation, anniversary, sunset, and coffee date begins asking the same question:

    “Should we post this?”

    At that moment, life subtly shifts from being lived to being curated.

    The relationship acquires a marketing department.

    I sometimes wonder whether the saddest consequence of social media is not that it encourages vanity, but that it gradually replaces identity with performance. Careers disappear. Hobbies fade. Conversations are forgotten. Complexity evaporates.

    People become remembered for one repetitive act.

    This couple may have built remarkable lives. They may have overcome hardships I know nothing about. They may possess virtues worthy of admiration.

    Yet I suspect that to hundreds of acquaintances they have become something far smaller.

    They are simply the couple that always posts.

    That strikes me as a peculiar tragedy.

    A lifetime compressed into an algorithmic reflex.

    Not because they smile too much.

    But because somewhere along the way, their happiness stopped looking like a gift and started resembling a job.