Cinemorphosis

Tag: writing

  • Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    Carlsbad’s Shadow, Oceanside’s Soul

    We spent a few days in Carlsbad at the Hotel Solea. Aside from the sublime crepes at The French Corner and the infectious energy of surfers drifting through town with boards tucked under their arms, the place left me strangely cold. Carlsbad struck me as polished to the point of sterility, a resort town forever orbiting the gravitational pull of Legoland. Everywhere you looked, there were souvenir shops, family vacation logistics, and the unmistakable soundtrack of overtired toddlers conducting negotiations at full volume. The town seemed suspended in a permanent state of cheerful tourism.

    Then, on the drive home, we traveled fifteen minutes north on Interstate 5 and discovered Oceanside.

    The difference was immediate.

    Instead of curated resort charm, Oceanside possessed the rough confidence of a town that exists for the people who actually live there. We wandered into The Beach Break Cafe, tucked beside a residential neighborhood, where every table seemed occupied by people who looked genuinely happy to be exactly where they were. Nothing about the place felt manufactured. There was no Instagram choreography, no designer rusticity, no desperate attempt to convince diners they were enjoying an “authentic experience.” It simply was authentic.

    More importantly, they don’t phone in breakfast.

    They treat eggs, pancakes, and French toast with the seriousness of a Michelin chef preparing foie gras. The omelets were generously stuffed without collapsing into greasy excess. The French toast achieved that elusive balance of crisp edges and custardy center. The whole-grain banana pancakes possessed a nutty richness that made them taste less like indulgence than craftsmanship.

    The manager—a fit man in his thirties with a neatly trimmed beard and a weathered gray baseball cap—told me he had taken over the restaurant from his father. Born and raised in Oceanside, he spoke about the community with the quiet pride of someone who had no desire to escape it. He mentioned that elite fighters from Camp Pendleton regularly come in for breakfast. After one bite, I understood why. If your profession involves throwing another human being across a room, this is precisely where you’d replenish your glycogen stores.

    That conversation crystallized the difference between the two towns.

    Carlsbad feels like milquetoast chic: affluent, immaculate, and carefully curated for visitors. Oceanside has working-class muscle. It doesn’t seem interested in impressing you. It simply gets on with the business of living. There is an honesty to that kind of place, a confidence that doesn’t require branding consultants or lifestyle influencers to validate it.

    Fifteen minutes separate Carlsbad from Oceanside.

    Culturally, they feel like different countries.

    I’ll take Oceanside.

  • Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    Breakfast at the Edge of Another World

    One morning I sat at the piano while my wife prepared her breakfast—a pot of rolled oats simmering quietly on the stovetop. As the warm, earthy aroma drifted through the house, I was four years old again, carried backward in time to the winter of 1966.

    My brother had not yet been born. It was just my mother, my father, and me driving toward Lake Tahoe. Before we reached our destination, a snowstorm descended with more fury than anyone expected. My father had no tire chains, so we abandoned the journey and took refuge in a small roadside motel, where we remained snowbound for several days while the Sierra disappeared beneath an endless blanket of white.

    My parents bought provisions from a nearby market. Every morning we ate bowls of Quaker Oats sweetened with brown sugar and cooled with milk. To my four-year-old self, it was paradise. Even today, no gourmet breakfast can rival the comfort contained in those humble bowls of oatmeal.

    Yet the smell of those oats carried an unexpected paradox. They meant warmth, safety, and home, but they also became permanently entwined with something altogether stranger. We were isolated in a tiny motel, surrounded by a landscape so white and silent that it seemed the world itself had vanished. We were a single glowing window in an infinite universe of snow.

    The motel television only deepened the feeling that we had crossed into another reality. Alongside familiar cartoons appeared programs I had never imagined could exist. There was Sinbad Jr. and His Magic Belt. Stranger still was a British science-fiction serial called Fireball XL5, whose cast consisted entirely of marionettes speaking with impeccable British accents.

    To my four-year-old mind, Fireball XL5 felt less like a television show than a fever dream accidentally transmitted from another galaxy. Nothing obeyed the ordinary rules of childhood. The marionettes smiled with unsettling serenity, their painted faces suspended somewhere between fearless astronauts and department-store mannequins that had wandered off after closing time. Their rocket streaked through glittering constellations that looked as though someone had punched tiny holes into black velvet with an ice pick. The dialogue carried the solemn authority of Shakespeare performed by sleepwalkers, while the eerie electronic score suggested that outer space was inhabited not by extraterrestrials but by ghosts.

    At four years old, I lacked the vocabulary to call it surreal. I only knew that I loved it because it made no sense. Fireball XL5 occupied that peculiar territory where wonder and nightmare shake hands, leaving a child convinced that television, like dreams, had uncovered a hidden dimension adults somehow accepted without question.

    Those three snowbound days fused together two emotional worlds that have never since separated. The comforting smell of oatmeal became permanently married to the delicious strangeness of Fireball XL5. This is what I call The Cozy Uncanny: the emotional condition in which domestic comfort becomes inseparable from profound otherness, producing memories that remain both reassuring and dreamlike.

    When my wife’s oatmeal filled our kitchen this morning, it carried me effortlessly back to that motel near Lake Tahoe. A single scent collapsed sixty years. Suddenly I was once again that little boy sitting safely indoors while an unknowable universe waited just beyond the frosted window.

    Perhaps that is why my favorite smells remain the smells of breakfast: rolled oats, French toast, pancakes browning on a griddle, maple syrup warming in the air. These aromas do more than remind me of childhood. They reassure me that no matter how strange the surrounding world becomes, there remains a path back home. I sometimes think that if I were suddenly transported into the bizarre universe of Fireball XL5, the smell of oatmeal alone would give me enough confidence to believe I could find my way back.

    People often predict that religion will eventually disappear, that modernity will finally outgrow humanity’s longing for transcendence. I doubt it. Our deepest desires are not arguments but homesickness. We are creatures who instinctively seek warmth, belonging, and a place where the strange finally becomes familiar. The smell of rolled oats, French toast, or pancakes does not merely awaken nostalgia. It awakens the ancient conviction that somewhere there exists a home we have not entirely forgotten.

    Perhaps our religious impulse is nothing more—and nothing less—than that incurable longing to return there.

  • The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    The Great G-Shock-Seiko Divide

    Jeremy lives in Louisiana, but over the past decade he and I have shared the peculiar fraternity that develops among people who have spent far too much time thinking about watches. He has followed my YouTube channel long enough to witness my latest affliction unfold in real time.

    It began six months ago with a Casio G-Shock Frogman GWF-1000.

    Then came the Rescue GW-7900.

    Soon afterward I was fully initiated into the cult of Multiband-6. Every night while I slept, invisible radio signals synchronized my watches to atomic clocks, and every morning I awoke to the intoxicating certainty that the digits on my wrist displayed the exact time—not approximately, not close enough, but the precise time.

    Jeremy watched this transformation with sympathy until he made the fatal mistake of buying a few Multiband-6 G-Shocks himself.

    Recently he wrote to confess that his own hobby had entered a state of upheaval.

    Not ruined.

    Upended.

    He had contracted the same addiction.

    Like me, he had become enslaved to the quiet pleasure of glancing at a digital display that never needed correction. Like me, he found himself staring at mechanical divers worth several thousand dollars and struggling to justify putting them on his wrist. His collection, like mine, had suffered what I call The Great Divide.

    Mine is specifically the G-Shock–Seiko Divide.

    Jeremy’s divide is somewhat different. His luxury mechanical pieces wear both Swiss passports and Japanese ones, but the conflict is identical.

    Two incompatible ideas of what a watch should be now compete for the same wrist.

    Ironically, this essay began as something far more trivial.

    I intended to make a YouTube video reviewing my Seiko divers on Divecore Waffle straps made from Hydrogenated Nitrile Butadiene Rubber. Three of my twenty-millimeter Divecore Waffles currently adorn my Seiko SLA055, SLA051, and SLA023. My SBDC203 remains on its original Seiko “Chocolate Bar” rubber strap, while my Seiko Tuna SBBN049 wears a twenty-two-millimeter Divecore Waffle.

    I genuinely miss my Divecore FKM HP straps. They were magnificent. Yet the lingering discussion surrounding PFAS—the so-called “forever chemicals” associated with fluorinated materials—finally persuaded me that they were an unnecessary source of anxiety. My suspicion is that the straps are probably harmless. But “probably harmless” is an awkward companion for something strapped to your skin every day. Why carry even a hypothetical worry when the Divecore Waffles are every bit as handsome?

    I had planned to spend twenty minutes discussing rubber straps.

    Then I stopped myself.

    Who cares about straps?

    I already made peace with abandoning steel bracelets years ago.

    The straps weren’t the story.

    The story was that I had reached a point where every glance at my watch box required choosing between two entirely different philosophies.

    My Seikos are objects of astonishing beauty.

    Their dials possess depth, warmth, texture, and craftsmanship that industrial resin can never hope to imitate. On today’s used market my five Seiko divers are probably worth around nine thousand dollars. They are miniature works of art.

    My G-Shocks, by contrast, are worth perhaps a thousand dollars altogether.

    They are molded from industrial resin.

    They resemble equipment more than jewelry.

    They synchronize themselves every night.

    They weigh almost nothing.

    They display the exact time in large, unapologetic digits.

    They ask nothing of me.

    The Seikos appeal to my aesthetic imagination.

    The G-Shocks satisfy my practical mind.

    Guess which one wins about ninety percent of the time.

    It would be easy to write one of those tiresome minimalist sermons declaring that I should have skipped expensive mechanical watches altogether and bought only affordable G-Shocks. Such hindsight is wonderfully economical because it edits out the actual life that was lived.

    For more than twenty years I sowed my horological oats among mechanical watches.

    There was obsession.

    There was ecstasy.

    There was irrationality.

    There was financial excess.

    There was genuine beauty.

    There was hard-earned knowledge.

    Without those decades, I would never appreciate the peculiar satisfaction of glancing at a Mudman GW-9500 and knowing that the time displayed is as accurate as physics presently allows.

    Counterfactual histories are comforting fantasies. They allow us to imagine that wisdom could have arrived without tuition.

    It cannot.

    An hour before writing this, I was wearing my beloved Seiko Uemura. I admired its magnificent dial, then found myself squinting to determine the approximate time.

    Approximate.

    A few moments later I quietly removed it and fastened the Mudman to my wrist.

    Jeremy understands exactly why.

    My suspicion is that thousands of other watch enthusiasts do as well. Once you’ve crossed the Great Divide, you never entirely return. The two worlds continue to coexist, each beautiful in its own way, while your wrist quietly votes for only one.

  • My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    My Adventures in Threshold Tourism

    You insist on living near the ocean, but not because you have any romantic desire to surf, bodyboard, or frolic in the waves like a sunscreen commercial. The beach serves a higher purpose. It calms you simply by existing. You need to smell the salt air, hear the muffled percussion of the surf, and watch the horizon dissolve into infinity. What you do not need is to step into the Pacific’s suspicious broth of runoff, seaweed, sunscreen residue, and whatever else civilization has politely donated to the tides. Nor do you wish to experience the tactile indignity of sand infiltrating every crevice of your body, clothing, luggage, and soul. During vacations in Oahu or Miami, you dutifully reserve a room overlooking the beach, then spend the day luxuriating beside the resort pool, periodically glancing toward the ocean with profound gratitude that you are not actually in it.

    Deserts present a similar paradox. From a safe distance they possess a cinematic grandeur, a landscape sculpted by eternity itself. Up close they reveal themselves to be an elaborate rehearsal for the apocalypse. Every cactus appears armed, every rock radiates hostility, and every gust of wind feels like the opening chapter of Mad Max. Your lips chap. Your skin shrivels. Your eyeballs seem to lose moisture by the minute. After forty-eight hours you become convinced you are quietly mummifying while still alive.

    Snow fares no better. Others speak reverently of winter wonderlands. You see an aggressively inhospitable climate masquerading as a Christmas card. Snow closes roads, freezes lungs, transforms ordinary errands into survival expeditions, and renders every hillside one unfortunate sneeze away from an avalanche. Even aesthetically it disappoints. An endless field of white is less majestic than monotonous, as though nature had forgotten to finish painting the landscape. Icicles, meanwhile, look less like decorations than nature’s collection of sharpened stakes awaiting an unfortunate passerby. One of your life’s quiet triumphs has been constructing a life that requires almost no interaction with snow whatsoever.

    Instead, you are captivated by what you call Unicorn Cities—those mythical communities that seem to have discovered the cheat code to geography. They enjoy unusually pleasant weather, attract unusually decent people, and somehow escape the afflictions suffered by neighboring regions. Port Angeles occupies a privileged place in this private mythology. Nestled within Washington’s Banana Belt, it promises milder temperatures than logic suggests it deserves. You are endlessly fascinated by it. You consume photographs, weather reports, and travel videos with almost devotional enthusiasm. Yet you have no real desire to go. Visiting would replace imagination with reality, and reality almost never survives comparison with imagination.

    So congratulate yourself for remaining loyal to your quiet corner of Southern California, where you leave town only reluctantly, tan in your own backyard for fifteen minutes a few afternoons each week, and venture to Hawaii or Miami once or twice a year merely to sit beside an immaculate swimming pool while gazing at the ocean from a respectful distance.

    You are, after all, a Threshold Tourist.

    A Threshold Tourist prefers to remain at the edge of an experience rather than surrender to it, extracting its beauty, symbolism, and emotional nourishment while politely declining its inconveniences. The destination is not meant to be conquered or consumed. It is meant to be contemplated. Paradise, in your estimation, is best appreciated from the balcony.

  • The Young and the Larval

    The Young and the Larval

    A year ago, I attended a family birthday party in Studio City. Hundreds of cheerful, talkative guests wandered around a lavish backyard pool shaded by thick stands of trees. The setting felt less like Los Angeles than a country estate in Provence. Beneath a canopy, guests feasted on fragrant Middle Eastern food while a white-haired band by the deep end of the pool played one boomer anthem after another. It was a celebration of long lives, old friendships, and accumulated memories.

    Most of the guests were in their seventies.

    While eating lunch, I spoke with my cousin’s husband, a retired ophthalmologist and former hospital administrator. A man who had once occupied positions of enormous responsibility, he told me the greatest surprise of old age wasn’t aching joints or declining stamina.

    It was invisibility.

    “People look right through you,” he said.

    His remark landed with the force of an unwelcome prophecy. Your accomplishments, reputation, expertise, and decades of experience quietly evaporate. Whatever authority once entered the room ahead of you no longer accompanies you through the door. You undergo what I call Aura Expiration: the quiet disappearance of the prestige, authority, and social recognition accumulated over a lifetime once age strips away the culture’s fascination with achievement and status.

    Yesterday’s distinguished physician becomes today’s anonymous old man standing patiently in line at Trader Joe’s.

    Aura Expiration ushers you into something even stranger. You enter what I think of as Social Hades: the peculiar stage of life in which a person remains physically present while gradually disappearing from society’s field of vision. You are neither fully among the living nor entirely absent. You become ghostlike—a witness rather than a participant—despite possessing more knowledge and experience than many of those who unconsciously dismiss you.

    Your very existence reminds younger people of the one truth they spend enormous energy avoiding: they, too, are running out of time.

    Naturally, there are ways to resist. You can dye your hair, chase fashion, cultivate the illusion of perpetual youth, or loudly insist that you are “still relevant.” But there is something tragic about watching a person wage war against chronology. The struggle itself often accelerates the indignity. Better to heed the biblical warning against kicking against the goads. Some losses are not defeats but transitions.

    Reading Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, I was struck by his observation that the Greeks imagined the afterlife as Hades, “an underworld where men’s shadows lead a sort of half-life: slow, comatose, larva-like, hardly aware.”

    I cannot help wondering whether this image grew partly from ordinary observation. Perhaps Hades resembled the fate awaiting the elderly in every civilization: still alive, yet treated as shadows; still capable of thought, yet gently ushered to the margins where they could cease interrupting youth’s fantasy of immortality.

    I have little interest in fighting that social reality. At best, younger people will treat me with courteous indifference. At worst, they will regard me as an inconvenient reminder that every fashionable face eventually wrinkles and every energetic stride slows.

    There is, however, one form of aging against which I intend to fight with all the stubbornness I possess.

    I refuse to let my mind become larval.

    I intend to keep reading difficult books, pursuing arguments, changing my mind when evidence demands it, writing essays, asking inconvenient questions, and remaining incurably curious. I would like to live forever, if only because I desperately want to know what happens next.

    Besides, history has a wicked sense of irony.

    Many young people imagine themselves to be in the thick of life merely because they inhabit the latest trends, wear the correct clothes, speak the approved vocabulary, and faithfully repeat the fashionable opinions of their tribe. Yet conformity has a way of anesthetizing curiosity. The mind quietly hardens while the body remains young.

    That is the true danger.

    Such people suffer from what I call The Larval Mind: a state of intellectual dormancy in which curiosity, skepticism, and independent judgment have withered away, leaving a person easily manipulated by fashion, ideology, algorithms, or tribal consensus. Their bodies pulse with youthful energy while their minds drift through life half-asleep.

    An eighty-year-old wrestling with Paul, Carrère, Darwin, artificial intelligence, and the future of civilization may be far younger than a twenty-five-year-old who has surrendered his thinking to TikTok, political orthodoxy, influencer culture, or whatever intellectual narcotic happens to dominate the moment.

    Perhaps youth has less to do with birthdays than with curiosity.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is not youth at all.

    Perhaps the opposite of old age is refusing to become larval.

  • When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    When the Watch Collection Is Complete But the Collector Isn’t

    If I were the sort of watch enthusiast content with half a dozen Tough Solar, Multiband-6 G-Shocks—a collection stretching from the hulking, superheroic Frogman to the modest, bespectacled GW-5000U—I would admire that collection for reasons having little to do with the watches themselves. Certainly, it would cover every practical need I could imagine. More important, however, it would signify that I had become an entirely different species of collector.

    My former self collected from a place of addiction, neediness, and what I have elsewhere called Gollumification. Every few months I required another gleaming mechanical diver, preferably one costing a few thousand dollars, to jolt me awake from the deadening fog of boredom. The ritual reminded me of suburban mothers in the late 1960s making their regular pilgrimage to the beauty salon to “get their hair done.” As a child, I watched them return transformed—not merely coiffed, but spiritually refurbished, buoyed by the conviction that a new hairstyle had somehow renewed the self beneath it.

    Waiting for FedEx to deliver an expensive Seiko diver is the masculine version of the same liturgy.

    Both rituals whisper the same seductive lie: This time you’ll feel complete.

    The object itself scarcely matters. Hair today. Watches tomorrow. Kitchen remodels, sports cars, cosmetic procedures, luxury vacations, religious conversions, career promotions, perfectly optimized bodies—the props change, but the script remains stubbornly familiar. We keep staging ceremonies of self-renewal, hoping the next acquisition will accomplish what none of its predecessors could.

    The collector I wish I were inhabits a different emotional universe. He still loves watches, perhaps loves them even more, but he no longer requires them to rescue him from himself. He can appreciate a beautifully engineered timepiece without recruiting it into a desperate campaign against boredom. His contentment is not the result of finally finding the perfect watch; it is the reason he no longer needs to keep looking for one.

    His most remarkable quality is not restraint but peace.

    He no longer hungers to be “energized” because boredom has ceased to function as an existential emergency. He no longer imagines that the next purchase will repair some invisible crack running through his identity. He is already whole before the courier rings the doorbell.

    Of course, I recognize this as a fantasy.

    I call it The Fantasy of the Whole Man: the dream that one final purchase, one decisive achievement, one dramatic conversion, or one perfectly timed life adjustment will usher us into permanent inner completion, rendering future craving obsolete. It imagines a version of ourselves so psychologically integrated that desire finally relinquishes its grip.

    No watch can perform that miracle.

    Yet the fantasy reveals something profoundly true about watch enthusiasts—and, indeed, about human beings generally. Beneath our fascination with polished titanium, Zaratsu finishing, Swiss escapements, or atomic timekeeping lies a quieter longing. We are not merely searching for the next beautiful object. We are searching for a version of ourselves that no longer requires beautiful objects to feel sufficient.

    That is the collection we never quite manage to complete.

  • The Great Social Media Deconversion

    The Great Social Media Deconversion

    In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”

    I had no idea what he meant.

    I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”

    Facebook barely registered on my radar.

    Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.

    Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.

    I was enchanted.

    Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.

    Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.

    People would discover me.

    I would become famous.

    How many friends could I accumulate?

    How many likes?

    How many followers?

    Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?

    The intoxication was exquisite.

    That was seventeen years ago.

    Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.

    Contempt.

    Or perhaps futility.

    The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.

    Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.

    That is how social media feels now.

    Not tragic.

    Pointless.

    Because the marriage was built on lies.

    The lies sounded persuasive enough.

    Metrics measure significance.

    Engagement proves value.

    Visibility creates influence.

    Influence creates meaning.

    If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.

    It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.

    The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.

    Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.

    The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.

    The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.

    Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.

    We are auditioning for an algorithm.

    Attention capture is not meaning.

    Attention capture is not love.

    Attention capture is not flourishing.

    One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.

    A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.

    The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.

    He looked exhausted.

    Not physically.

    Spiritually.

    As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.

    I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.

    I did it for his dignity.

    And for mine.

    Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.

    They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.

    I still write on my blog.

    Almost nobody reads it.

    Wonderful.

    Obscurity has become strangely liberating.

    I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.

    The work belongs to me again.

    People often wonder what comes after divorce.

    The honest answer is that nobody knows.

    You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.

    I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.

    We experienced the honeymoon.

    We believed the promises.

    We invested our identities.

    We discovered the betrayal.

    Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.

    We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.

    R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.

    I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.

    But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.

    People are tiring of the performance.

    The masks have grown heavy.

    The applause no longer sounds convincing.

    Something new is approaching.

    Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.

    I only know that the old marriage is over.

    And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.

  • The Dishwasher and the Soul

    The Dishwasher and the Soul

    People love to narrate themselves into virtue. They announce that they are resilient, compassionate, emotionally intelligent, enlightened. Fine. But character is not established by autobiography. It is established by collateral damage. The verdict is rendered not by the stories we tell about ourselves but by the people who must live with us.

    By that standard, I don’t receive flattering marks.

    I alienate people. Friendships wither. Members of my own family find me exhausting. I do not know how to repair whatever defect keeps reproducing these outcomes. Self-loathing only deepens the rut. It is like trying to escape quicksand by thrashing harder.

    For years my wife has insisted that I have Asperger’s, though I have never received a formal diagnosis. In 2013, I saw a psychiatrist who concluded that I had escaped my mother’s severe depression and bipolar disorder only to inherit a milder companion: dysthymia, a chronic, low-grade depression that rarely knocks you flat but seldom lets you stand fully upright. I eventually stopped seeing him after realizing that I seemed to be providing more entertainment than receiving treatment. I would leave his office lighter in wallet but not in spirit. The experience merely reinforced my suspicion that therapy, at least in my case, was proving more theatrical than therapeutic.

    So I became my own maintenance department.

    Routine is my antidepressant. I cling to it with the desperation of a fish clinging to water. Remove it, and anxiety rushes in to occupy the vacuum. Home becomes less a residence than a fortified monastery whose sacred relics are my kettlebells, exercise bike, piano, protein powder, creatine, and carefully arranged supplements. Every object reassures me that the machinery of the day can continue without surprise.

    Leaving this sanctuary, even for something as benign as a vacation, often feels less like recreation than exile.

    While other people return from holidays refreshed, carrying photographs and amusing anecdotes, I return as though I have survived a natural disaster. Friends ask, “How was your vacation?” I usually shrug because I honestly cannot answer. It dissolves into a hazy montage of disrupted routines, low-grade dread, and the relief of finally coming home. Rather than becoming more engaged with life, I retreat inward. I regress. I become emotionally unavailable. Sometimes I stay home to spare my family the burden of dragging me through another reluctant excursion. They enjoy themselves more, but they miss me all the same.

    That realization hurts.

    I often feel as though I am the heaviest burden my family carries. I bought us a home in a beautiful coastal suburb. The mortgage is gone. We enjoy financial security and enough discretionary income to live comfortably. Yet I cannot escape Christ’s unsettling question, slightly rewritten for my own circumstances: What does it profit a family to live in a lovely house if the husband and father carries conspicuous gaps in his emotional life?

    If there were a genuine cure, I would pursue it tomorrow.

    A retreat deep in the woods. An ayahuasca ceremony promising psychic rebirth. A religious conversion dramatic enough to rearrange the furniture of my soul. If someone could convincingly promise to transform me from an anxious, melancholy recluse into a man whose presence naturally enlarged the lives of others, I would sign the consent form before they finished explaining the side effects.

    Instead, the dishwasher beeps.

    In half an hour I’ll empty it, wipe down the counters, and make salmon, rice, and salad for my family. It is not redemption, but it is dinner.

    Perhaps this is where real life usually unfolds—not in miraculous transformations but in ordinary competence. I can contribute. I can keep the kitchen running. I can exercise. I can stay away from alcohol. I can show up for the responsibilities that lie directly before me, even if I stumble over the emotional ones that lie beyond them.

    There is an old wisdom about staying in your lane. It is not a cure, but it prevents unnecessary collisions.

    Good physical health is not salvation, but it helps. Financial stability is not happiness, but it removes many unnecessary sorrows. A clean kitchen does not heal the mind, but it gives tomorrow one less disorder to inherit.

    So, for now, gratitude remains my most reliable therapy—not because it erases my defects, but because it keeps them from becoming the only facts I recognize. It reminds me that a life can be imperfect without being worthless, that a man can remain unfinished without being beyond repair, and that sometimes the most meaningful victories are measured not in dramatic breakthroughs but in quietly making dinner when your mind insists you’ve accomplished nothing at all.

  • The Ghost at the End of My Block

    The Ghost at the End of My Block

    An unkempt, unemployed man in his sixties—I’ll call him D—lives on my street. He is painfully thin, wears a beard that seems less grown than surrendered to, and carries the thousand-yard stare of someone who has spent too many years trapped inside his own mind. He is the neighborhood’s resident ghost, the subject of whispered conversations held over hedges and driveways whenever his name comes up.

    I rarely see him anymore.

    With each passing year he seems to retreat another step from the world. According to my neighbors, he now walks his dog only after dark, as if daylight itself has become an adversary.

    The last time we spoke was more than a decade ago. He told me his mother had emigrated from Ukraine. She was still alive then but has since passed away. He admitted he struggled with clinical depression. Once upon a time he earned his living in real estate. He loved photography. He struck me as intelligent, thoughtful, even pleasant. Nothing about him suggested the caricature of the neighborhood eccentric.

    Depression, however, is not content merely to inhabit a person. Given enough years, it colonizes the landscape around him.

    D’s house looks less like a residence than a psychological self-portrait.

    Weeds have risen high enough to conceal much of the property, swallowing the front yard as if nature were quietly reclaiming it. Enormous rocks lie scattered across the lot—not arranged with the intention of landscaping but dumped haphazardly, as though an avalanche had paused just long enough to empty its pockets. A rusted car sits permanently marooned in the driveway, stripped of its engine, one of those eternal restoration projects that never progresses beyond the fantasy stage.

    Then there is the roof.

    Or rather, the absence of one.

    Instead of shingles, enormous black tarps have been stretched across the house like bandages wrapped around a wound too deep to heal. The place resembles less a home than a disaster site awaiting inspectors who never arrive.

    The neighbors tell me D has owned five yellow Labrador retrievers over the past twenty-five years.

    Each one has had exactly the same name.

    Reggie.

    Perhaps it is sentiment. Perhaps ritual. Or perhaps depression dislikes novelty and prefers the comforting illusion that nothing essential has changed.

    Reggie, unfortunately, is also a source of neighborhood diplomacy. D has a habit of letting him roam unleashed, which periodically inspires shouted exchanges with nearby homeowners who are less enchanted by canine freedom than D appears to be.

    Recently, the family next door began an ambitious renovation. They moved out for a year while contractors demolished and rebuilt much of their home at a cost north of half a million dollars.

    During one conversation, one of the neighbors revealed something I had never considered.

    The tarps.

    They aren’t merely ugly.

    They are loud.

    Every windy night they snap, crack, and whip against the roof structure with relentless fury, sounding less like construction material than a chorus of agitated ghosts auditioning for Poltergeist. Sleep becomes impossible.

    So the neighbors arrived at a remarkably practical conclusion.

    Since they were already spending roughly $600,000 rebuilding their own home, they decided to buy D a new roof.

    The cost?

    About $20,000.

    It is an act of generosity, certainly.

    It is also an investment in uninterrupted sleep.

    When you’ve already committed well over half a million dollars to creating your dream home, another twenty thousand begins to look less like charity than an effective noise-canceling device.

    Every neighborhood, it seems, has its own D.

    There is always one house that refuses to cooperate with the local mythology of upward mobility. Every freshly painted facade, every manicured lawn, every luxury SUV in the driveway quietly tells a story of competence, prosperity, and orderly lives. Then there is the one property that interrupts the narrative like an uncomfortable footnote. It reminds everyone that not every life can be renovated with quartz countertops, drought-tolerant landscaping, and a designer front door.

    Some houses broadcast success.

    Others testify to defeat.

    D’s house has become an architectural memoir of prolonged suffering, a place where depression has seeped from the mind into the soil, the weeds, the rusting car, and finally the roof itself.

    Replacing the tarps with shingles will not rewrite that story.

    A new roof cannot cure clinical depression. It cannot restore lost ambition, resurrect old dreams, or persuade a haunted man that tomorrow will be kinder than yesterday.

    But it can silence the ghosts.

  • The G-Shock Boys

    The G-Shock Boys

    For decades he devoted himself to mechanical dive watches.

    His collection consumed tens of thousands of dollars, countless evenings on watch forums, and enough YouTube viewing to qualify as graduate work in horology. Every purchase promised permanence. Every new bezel, movement, and dial texture whispered that contentment was only one more acquisition away.

    Then, almost by accident, he bought a humble resin Casio G-Shock with Multiband 6 and Tough Solar.

    Everything changed.

    For the first time in his adult life, he glanced at his wrist and saw not merely the time, but the correct time. Alongside it sat the date and the day of the week, all delivered with effortless certainty. No winding. No resetting. No wondering whether the movement had drifted six or seven seconds since breakfast.

    He had quietly crossed a border.

    He had left the Kingdom of Approximate Time and entered the Republic of Accurate Time.

    The conversion brought unexpected peace.

    It also brought guilt.

    He felt as though he had betrayed lifelong companions—the mechanical-watch enthusiasts with whom he had shared triumphs, disappointments, and endless debates about lume, bezel action, and the superiority of one Swiss caliber over another. His social-media tribe suddenly felt like an abandoned religion. He experienced disorientation, grief, and the peculiar emotional wreckage that accompanies every genuine conversion.

    Confused, he confided in a trusted colleague.

    The man listened patiently and nodded.

    “I think you’re ready,” he finally said.

    “Ready for what?”

    “The House of Resin.”

    Perched atop one of the hills in Palos Verdes stood a sprawling Mediterranean mansion known only among initiates as The House of Resin.

    It existed for one purpose: helping newly converted souls orient themselves to life inside Accurate Time.

    Desperate, our hero made the pilgrimage.

    The front door swung open to reveal a portly, smiling gentleman who bore an uncanny resemblance to Sebastian Cabot. His cheerful eyes suggested that nothing in the universe surprised him anymore.

    “Welcome,” he said warmly. “I’m Jaunty.”

    The living room resembled an English country house designed by Casio. Bach cello suites floated through magnificent loudspeakers. Delicate porcelain cups brimmed with tea. Crackers of suspiciously exceptional quality circulated on silver trays.

    Around the room sat a dozen men.

    Every one of them wore a G-Shock.

    Every one of them looked profoundly uncomfortable, like survivors of a shipwreck who had somehow washed ashore in paradise but still missed the sinking vessel.

    After the tea had been poured and the crackers consumed, Jaunty’s smile disappeared.

    His posture stiffened.

    His eyes narrowed.

    “The time for pleasantries has ended.”

    Silence swallowed the room.

    “You are here because you have awakened. You have escaped Approximate Time, but you are not yet free. Freedom demands sacrifice.”

    He paused.

    “The first step is simple.”

    Another pause.

    “You will sell every mechanical watch you own.”

    A collective gasp swept through the room.

    “You will donate the proceeds to organizations that feed the hungry. Research them carefully. Find those worthy of your trust.”

    His voice softened.

    “You cannot carry two kingdoms on one wrist.”

    No one argued.

    The command possessed the quiet authority of Scripture.

    Within days the watches were gone.

    The strange thing was not the loss.

    It was what followed.

    Every man felt lighter.

    Younger.

    More awake.

    Many developed an overwhelming urge to walk for hours. During those solitary journeys, decades of buying, selling, flipping, chasing limited editions, and refreshing dealer websites replayed in vivid detail.

    They watched themselves as though observing strangers.

    Marionettes dancing on strings they had never noticed.

    As realization deepened, their pace quickened.

    Many found themselves crying.

    Not polite tears.

    Not cinematic tears.

    The deep, involuntary tears that arrive when an illusion finally surrenders.

    They no longer cared who saw them.

    The tears required no apology.

    The following week they returned.

    Each told essentially the same story.

    Jaunty nodded.

    “Excellent.”

    Then his expression darkened.

    “Do not mistake liberation for completion.”

    He explained that exhilaration would eventually give way to doubt, loneliness, and nostalgia. Recovery always progressed that way.

    Then he introduced Step Two.

    “You will train.”

    The men looked puzzled.

    “You will exercise four days each week. Lift weights. Swing kettlebells. Practice yoga. Climb ropes. Do calisthenics. I do not care what discipline you choose. Your body has spent years transporting your obsession. It is now time for your obsession to transport your body.”

    One participant timidly raised his hand.

    “Ever since selling my watches I’ve been walking two hours every day.”

    The others nodded enthusiastically.

    “So have we.”

    Jaunty smiled kindly.

    “Those are not workouts.”

    “What are they?”

    “Exorcisms.”

    The room fell silent.

    “They are necessary.”

    “But they do not count.”

    Within days the men discovered the irresistible simplicity of a twenty-five-pound kettlebell and an online instructor promising complete physical transformation through twelve exercises performed in a continuous one-hour circuit.

    Every garage became a monastery.

    Every kettlebell became a sacrament.

    By the third week something extraordinary began happening.

    Crows appeared.

    One landed on a fence and clearly announced,

    “Casio.”

    Another cried,

    “G-Shock.”

    A third declared,

    “Solar.”

    When the men nervously described these encounters, Jaunty beamed.

    “Entirely normal,” he assured them.

    “The crows always come.”

    “What should we do?”

    “Feed them breadcrumbs.”

    By the fourth week, no one arrived wearing ordinary clothes.

    Their bodies had changed.

    Their old wardrobes no longer fit—not physically or psychologically.

    Athletic clothing had become their natural attire.

    Their wrists displayed beloved G-Shocks with the quiet confidence formerly reserved for Swiss luxury.

    Jaunty surveyed them with unmistakable satisfaction.

    “You have completed your initiation.”

    He dimmed the lights.

    “For your graduation…”

    “…I have prepared a film.”

    The title appeared.

    THE G-SHOCK BOYS

    Part documentary.

    Part infomercial.

    Part religious testimony.

    It chronicled every stage of their transformation—from obsessive collectors imprisoned by luxury to cheerful disciples liberated by resin, solar charging, and atomic time.

    Against every expectation, the film became a worldwide sensation.

    Clips flooded social media.

    Millions watched.

    Soon the men found themselves traveling the globe, not to discuss watches, but to explain the strange freedom that arrived only after they stopped believing that another purchase could save them.

    They still wore watches.

    They had simply stopped asking them to tell them who they were.