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The Myth of the Ultimate Watch Collection

There is no such thing as an ultimate watch collection. That fantasy survives only in Instagram grids and forum signatures. In real life, your taste sharpens, clarifies, narrows—and that clarity does bring you closer to something satisfying. But it never brings closure.

The problem is not the watches. The problem is us.

We are capricious animals. One day we crave restraint; the next day we want spectacle. Nostalgia ambushes us and sends us chasing a watch tied to some earlier version of ourselves—college years, first job, first illusion of competence. Sometimes that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. A watch can be a time machine or a dead end.

Then there’s money. Grail pieces often cost so much that they can’t be worn without anxiety. They live in safes, not on wrists. You admire them abstractly but never bond with them. On the other end, budget watches sometimes fail the respect test. You want to love them, but something feels compromised—finish, heft, presence. The relationship never quite takes.

So if there is a destination, it isn’t perfection. It’s the sweet spot.

The watch isn’t too small or too large. It isn’t priced so high that you fear it, or so low that you dismiss it. It isn’t dull, but it isn’t shouting either. You can look at it from different angles and keep finding reasons to linger. It holds your attention without demanding it.

Some people chase that feeling through complexity. Chronographs seduce with their subdials and mechanical busyness. I tried that path. Instead of enchantment, I got sensory overload. Too much information. Too much pleading. I found myself longing for the blunt honesty of a diver.

But even a diver has to earn its place.

It needs salient features. Bold, but not desperate. Visually striking, but instantly legible. Purposeful without cosplay. The Seiko MM300 SLA023 comes to mind. It’s a legend in the Seiko lineup because it commits fully to its identity. Over 44mm wide. About 15mm thick. It doesn’t apologize. If you can carry those dimensions, it rewards you with gravitas and coherence.

If you can’t, there are alternatives.

The Seiko Alpinist SBDC209 is a different kind of seduction. At 39.5mm, it’s compact, refined, endlessly stare-able. You can live with it all day without fatigue. On the right wrist, it’s perfect. On mine, it disappears. And when a watch disappears, the answer is simple: no.

That’s the truth most collectors avoid. The “ultimate” collection isn’t about consensus or rankings. It’s about proportion—between the watch and the wrist, between desire and restraint, between fantasy and daily life.

You don’t arrive at it once.
You circle it.
And if you’re lucky, you pause there for a while.

January 27, 2026
The $80 Radio That Beat the Big Boys

Five mornings a week, I work out in my garage—kettlebells clanging, yoga mat unrolled, joints negotiating a ceasefire. The soundtrack is Larry Mantle on LAist 89.3 FM, broadcasting from Pasadena. This matters because Torrance is not Pasadena, and 89.3 is a notoriously fragile signal here. It fades, ghosts, sulks. Catching it cleanly is less a matter of tuning than of faith.

Then there’s the noise. Torrance mornings are an industrial symphony: garbage trucks reversing, leaf blowers screaming like jet engines, lawnmowers revving, cars tearing past as if late for something existential. Any garage radio that can’t project authority is immediately demoted to paperweight.

I briefly considered going big—dropping $300 on a Tecsun S-8800 field radio, a machine that looks like it should come with a government-issued lanyard. But after cycling a parade of smaller radios through the garage, I landed—almost sheepishly—on the Qodosen DX-286. And it has been an ambush.

On FM, the Qodosen is a brute. It grabs 89.3 at full strength and refuses to let go. Its 3-watt speaker is loud without being cruel, present without being shrill. Placed in just the right corner of the garage, away from interference, it becomes a small, defiant monument to good engineering. Unfettered, it sings.

The most embarrassing part is that I once returned it.

I didn’t trust it. An $80 radio performing this well felt like a trick. Too good to be true. I convinced myself it was a short-lived overachiever—high performance, early death. So I sent it back and went crawling to my more expensive radios: the Tecsun PL-660, the PL-680. Fine machines. Respectable. And yet, one by one, they lost the FM battle and the speaker war.

The absence of the Qodosen grew louder than the radios I owned.

Eight months ago, I rebought it, tail between my legs. It has been my garage companion ever since. Morning after morning, it cuts through the din and delivers Larry Mantle like clockwork. Kettlebells swing. Downward dogs are held. The signal holds.

Sometimes the best gear isn’t the one with the most gravitas or the highest price tag. Sometimes it’s the small, stubborn box you didn’t believe in—until it refused to be ignored.

January 27, 2026
The Submarine That Got Me Punished

One afternoon in Mrs. Eckhart’s fifth-grade class, I finished my reading questions early and found myself with a full hour to kill. So I did what any quietly restless child with access to art paper would do: I drew a gigantic submarine.

It was glorious. The hull bristled with portal windows, and inside each window lived a tiny, talkative world. Every occupant had something urgent to say. One man was making pancakes and inviting others over. A woman, her hair set in curlers, announced she was in no condition to be seen. Another guy sulked over a bowl of cereal because the box promised a free toy and delivered nothing. Someone tried to nap in a hammock but complained about the noise. A girl had a strip of apple skin lodged between her teeth and was losing her mind over it. There were at least a dozen such figures—boasting, whining, confessing, performing.

It was a floating anthology of minor human grievances.

I was proud of it. I felt like I was getting valuable training for my future career writing for Mad Magazine. I was quiet. I was finished with my work. I was bothering no one.

Then Mrs. Eckhart appeared.

She moved down the aisle between desks, paused, and studied my drawing. I waited for praise—some acknowledgment of creativity, wit, talent. Instead, I got disdain. Her red hair was stacked into a bouffant, her eyebrows arched in judgment.

“Is this how you spend your time in my class?”

“But I finished the assignment,” I said. “I was working quietly.”

She ignored that and began reading my dialogue bubbles aloud, dripping sarcasm into every line. The class erupted in laughter—not the good kind, the kind that comes from watching someone get filleted by authority.

Then she delivered the verdict.

“Your parents should know how you’re spending your time in my classroom.”

She flipped the page over and wrote a note explaining my offense. I was to take it home, secure parental signatures, and return it like evidence.

That evening, after dinner, I showed my father the drawing.

He was livid.

“You pissed off your teacher,” he said.

“I don’t know why,” I said. “I finished my work. I was quiet.”

“It doesn’t matter. You insulted her.”

“I don’t get it.”

“By finishing early and doodling, you implied her work was too easy. You disrespected her.”

“But I didn’t say anything. I just drew.”

“It doesn’t matter if you’re right,” he said. “What matters is you made her angry. In life, it’s better to be smart than to be right.”

“I thought those were the same thing.”

“Not always. Go to your room. Write her an apology.”

I wrote the apology. But even then, I knew—deep down—I had done nothing wrong. In fact, to this day, that submarine remains the best use of time I ever managed in her class.

The truth was simple: Mrs. Eckhart didn’t like me. I was brooding, inward, melancholic. She sensed something in me she found intolerable. Once, after she criticized a homework assignment, I tried to explain myself.

“You have an excuse for everything, don’t you?” she snapped.

If all my teachers had felt that way, I might accept the diagnosis. But they didn’t. Every other teacher thought I was polite, attentive, fine. There was something specific between us that never resolved.

Sometimes hostility is not psychological; it’s biblical. It has no cause, no logic, no cure.

I think of the excellent movie The Banshees of Inisherin. Colm abruptly ends his friendship with Padraic. No grievance. No inciting incident. “I just don’t like you anymore.” That’s it. Padraic hasn’t changed. Colm simply finds him unbearable.

After nearly forty years of teaching, I know this pattern well. I’ve been popular, well-liked, even beloved by students—but that hasn’t spared me the occasional student who radiated pure contempt. Once, friendly students asked if I noticed a guy in the back who glowered at me all semester. I told them yes. Every so often, someone decides you are intolerable. There is no appeal process.

In those cases, effort only makes things worse. Trying to win favor intensifies the repulsion. The Chinese phrase captures it perfectly: mei ban fa—nothing can be done.

Do I resent Mrs. Eckhart? A little. She was an authority figure with a visceral dislike for a ten-year-old boy. But what endures most isn’t bitterness. It’s joy.

That submarine was alive. It was funny. It was mine. No note home, no scolding, no pinch-faced teacher can take that away.

January 27, 2026
Losing My Classroom Key and Finding the End of the World

Twenty-six years ago, I lost my classroom key at a university. This was not treated as a minor inconvenience. It was treated as a moral failure.

I was summoned before a college administrator whose demeanor suggested I had been caught shoplifting ideas from Plato. She informed me—slowly, with relish—that the one thing a college instructor does not do is lose his key. She scanned me from head to toe the way a customs agent inspects a suitcase that smells faintly of contraband. My carelessness, she implied, had finally revealed my true identity: a professional bum, a sloth masquerading as an educator, a man unfit to shepherd students through anything more complex than a vending machine.

Once she had finished anatomizing my character, I asked—meekly—how one went about replacing a lost key.

“You don’t just get a replacement,” she said. “It’s a process.”

The word process landed like a sentence.

She explained that I would need to drive to a remote outpost on the edge of campus called Plant-Ops. There, I would meet a locksmith. I would give him my personal information and twenty dollars in cash. No check. No receipt. The arrangement sounded less like facilities management and more like a back-alley transaction involving counterfeit passports.

“How will I know who the locksmith is?” I asked.

“You’ll know him,” she said. “He’s the only person there.”

“What’s the place called again?”

“Plant-Ops.”

I repeated the name aloud, hoping to brand it into my memory. She looked at me as one looks at a child who has accidentally set fire to a jungle gym and informed me that I was dismissed.

Shamed and slightly afraid, I drove east from campus. The pavement gave way to dirt, then rubble, then something that barely qualified as a road. My car bucked and rattled as I passed cow skulls bleaching in the sun and tumbleweeds drifting like omens. Buzzards circled overhead. I was no longer in Southern California. I had crossed into a grim pocket dimension where entropy had been fast-forwarded and everything was quietly rehearsing its own ending. If someone had told me I would die there, I would not have argued.

At last, I reached Plant-Ops: a dilapidated hangar that looked one strong gust away from becoming a weather event. Inside stood the locksmith. He was short, grouchy, bespectacled, and gaunt, with a bushy mustache and a few desperate strands of black hair clinging to his bald skull. He wore a grease-splattered apron. Wind howled through the corrugated metal walls, and I half-expected the structure to lift off and spin into the sky like Dorothy’s house.

The man stood over a battered wooden workbench, glaring at me while eating cold SpaghettiOs straight from the can. His eyes bulged with irritation. My presence had clearly ruined his meal. Worse, it confirmed his theory of the world: incompetents abound, and today one had wandered into his hangar.

I explained that I had lost my key. I apologized as though I had personally engineered his inconvenience. He demanded twenty dollars in cash—up front—made the key, and then leaned in to warn me that he was retiring soon. His replacement, he said, was a complete idiot, incapable of making a functional key. I took this prophecy seriously.

I fled the hangar, drove directly to a hardware store, and purchased a Kevlar keychain with a tether reel, a high-density nylon belt loop, and enough industrial reinforcement to secure a small boat. From that day forward, my keys were attached to my body like an ankle monitor.

I have done worse things in my life—objectively worse—but for reasons I still don’t fully understand, losing that key put me briefly at odds with the universe. I had been consigned to a shame dungeon, escaped it by the skin of my teeth, and sworn never to return.

January 26, 2026
How a Toilet Seat Ruined My Workout

Eighteen months ago, when I tore my rotator cuff, I made the first of several reluctant concessions to age and anatomy. My one-hour kettlebell workouts dropped from five days a week to three. In their place, I resurrected the Schwinn Airdyne—a machine I trust because it does not care about my feelings. I rode it for 50 to 60 minutes, three or four days a week, and in the early going I had to work hard to burn 600 calories in 54 minutes. Progress came slowly, then grudgingly, then reliably. Soon it took only 48 minutes to hit 600. In the last month, I was regularly landing around 700 calories in 56 minutes.

Then came yesterday.

I burned 825 calories in 61 minutes. Nearly 800 calories per hour. That’s not training; that’s an episode. That’s one of those rare days when the body cooperates, the mind goes feral, and the machine quietly accepts its role as accomplice.

But we need to talk about today.

Today, I slogged. I crawled. I negotiated with myself minute by minute. I finished with a humiliating 500 calories in 56 minutes—a meager 535 calories per hour. That’s roughly a third less output than yesterday. As someone who motivates himself through numbers, benchmarks, and internal scorekeeping, this wasn’t just disappointing. It was existential.

Gamification cuts both ways.

There were, however, mitigating factors. Last night I spent three hours locked in mortal combat with an old toilet seat, sweating through three T-shirts while attempting to remove plastic wing nuts that had apparently fused with time itself. During this campaign, I punched myself in the face with a pair of pliers, opening a respectable gash across my nose. I woke up sore in places no exercise program claims credit for.

I suspected today’s ride would be compromised. I just didn’t anticipate how compromised. Working out this morning after last night’s ordeal felt like an NFL linebacker playing Monday Night Football and then being asked to suit up again on Thursday night. The schedule was punitive. What I needed was rest—another full day of it.

To console myself, I did what any reasonable person would do: I cooked the books. Surely that three-hour ordeal burned at least 400 calories. Add that to today’s 500 on the Airdyne and—there it is—900 calories. A full 200 calories over my goal.

Victory.

The ledger balances. My bragging rights are being processed. All that remains is a warm bathtub and the quiet satisfaction of knowing that even on an off day, I still managed to win the argument with myself.

January 26, 2026
I Lost a Fight With a Toilet Seat (and Won, Barely)

This morning, as I brushed my teeth and my daughters gathered their backpacks for the drive to school, I stared into the mirror and took inventory. There it was: a respectable gash carved into the crown of my nose. A souvenir. A reminder of last night’s three-hour descent into domestic warfare.

The catalyst was banal. For reasons known only to entropy, the American Standard elongated toilet seat in my daughters’ bathroom had cracked. I bought a replacement immediately. Then I let it sit in my office for two weeks, radiating quiet menace. I told myself the job would be simple. My instincts told me it would be biblical.

My instincts were correct.

The hinge bolts on top were buried beneath a geological formation of rust. The plastic wing nuts underneath were no better—coated in a crusty patina that suggested they had been forged during the Eisenhower administration. First, I scraped and cleaned. Then I sprayed. Then I tried to loosen. Nothing moved. The bolts might as well have been welded to the bowl.

So I escalated. Tools came out. Space disappeared. The cabinet loomed. There was no leverage, no angle, no dignity. I hammered. I wedged a flathead screwdriver against the bolt and struck it like I was trying to extract a confession. I attacked the wing nut with a wrench. Forty-five minutes passed. Sweat pooled. Hope thinned.

I called my best friend’s son, a preternaturally calm handyman with three young children screaming in the background. We FaceTimed. He studied the situation and said, serenely, “You’re going to twist the bottom bolt back and forth like a paperclip. Eventually it’ll snap.”

I thanked him and wedged myself beneath the toilet, contorting my body into a shape last attempted during Cold War espionage. I twisted. I rocked. At one point, my locking pliers slipped and I punched myself in the face, opening up my nose like a badly sealed envelope. Blood. Rage. Progress: none.

An hour had passed. I had mutilated one plastic wing nut into modern art. While I was assessing my wound in the mirror, my wife calmly removed the right wing nut. Half the job was done.

The left side, however, had ideas.

Two more hours vanished. Every tool failed. The space was tighter. My left shoulder—home to a torn rotator cuff—began to flare. Each push sent a warning shot of inflammation through my arm. I was exhausted. I was furious. I was within a centimeter of victory and flirting with surrender.

And then the thought arrived, dark and unforgivable: Call a plumber.

He would charge $150. He would finish in three minutes. He would charge $150 even if I stood there and wept. The fact that I had already invested two hours, blood, and cartilage made calling him impossible. Layered on top of that was wounded masculinity. Sixty-four years old. Fit. A lifetime of lifting. I could not—would not—summon a professional to do a man’s job while I watched.

Fueled by pride and spite, I ripped the toilet seat free, gaining better access but no relief. Then, in a moment of clarity bordering on madness, I reached for the wire-cutting pliers. I attacked the plastic wing nut with savage intent. Shards flew. The nut began to yield. This was not finesse. This was attrition.

Three hours in, shoulder inflamed, nose split, I finished the job.

What will I do next time? I will spend $99 on a Dremel with a cut-off wheel and end the ordeal in five minutes. That’s what I’ll do. When it comes to home repairs, knowledge is power—and ignorance is a slow bleed across your own bathroom floor. If I had known about the Dremel beforehand, it would have been worth every penny.

January 26, 2026
While Others Fell in Love, I Was Benching

In 1975, when I was fourteen and already grooming myself for eventual induction into the House of Schwarzenegger, I was struck with existential terror by an article in The San Francisco Chronicle. Futurists, it announced, were preparing us for the inevitable: Earth would soon be too crowded, too exhausted, too used up. Humanity would have to evacuate—via lunar shuttles—and establish solar-powered colonies in outer space.

The article leaned heavily on the ideas of Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton physicist whose vision would later crystallize in The High Frontier. We would live, he proposed, in “artificial, closed-ecology habitats in free orbit,” powered by vast solar arrays. Don Davis supplied illustrations: cottages, rolling green hills, fountains, happy citizens strolling through a weightless Eden that looked suspiciously like a New Age brochure for upscale suburbia.

Then I noticed something horrifying.

Everyone in the drawings was skinny. Not lean. Not athletic. Skinny in a faint, undernourished, anemic way. It dawned on me with the force of revelation: no gravity meant no resistance. No resistance meant no gyms. No iron. No pumping. My muscles would dissolve. I would become what I most feared—a tomato with toothpicks stuck into it, drifting through space in orthopedic sandals.

A forced relocation to an orbital colony wouldn’t just end bodybuilding. It would end me.

That moment revealed two durable truths about my character. First, I did not like change. Even minor disruptions—replacing stereo components, finding a new health club—felt borderline traumatic. The idea of being compelled to move to space was not exciting; it was annihilating. Second, bodybuilding wasn’t a hobby. It was a containment field. Anything that threatened it threatened my psychic infrastructure.

This may explain why girls confused and frightened me.

A few tried, valiantly, to breach my defenses. One was Mary Claybourne, a high school sophomore who had a very obvious crush on me. One afternoon at my locker, she handed me a birthday card. On the front it read: If It Feels Good, Do It! Inside, she had written a note inviting me to ask her out.

I remember standing by a pillar near the courtyard, reading her card, while Mary sat at a picnic table with her friends, looking at me with naked hope. The look was unmistakable. She wanted me to stride across the concrete, tear open my street clothes, emerge in a cape, and sweep her into a romance worthy of daytime television.

Instead, I stared at her beautiful eyes and thought only this: How can I possibly love this girl when civilization is on the brink of relocating to a gravity-free space colony where I won’t be able to bench press?

The question was absurd. Knowing it was absurd did nothing to soften the dread.

Looking back now, it’s clear I wasn’t ready for intimacy. Some teenagers arrive relatively intact, with enough internal coherence to connect to others without panic. I was not one of them. I was fragmented. Provisional. A self still under construction. I wasn’t merely a bodybuilder—I was a builder in the most literal sense. I had to assemble myself first. An embryo cannot date.

And yet, I sometimes wonder if that’s a convenient story. Maybe I should have waded into the shallow end of teenage romance and learned to flail. Maybe sinking a little would have strengthened muscles bodybuilding couldn’t touch. Maybe the gym wasn’t just discipline—it was refuge. A retreat from the unpredictable demands of real life.

What I know now is this: girls represented the same threat as space colonies. I liked them too much. I sensed that if I surrendered to romance, my monastic devotion to iron would falter. I had no talent for balance. If I served one master, I would resent the other.

So, overwhelmed by choice, I chose the one world I could control.

On Friday night, I did not date Mary Claybourne.

I dated the bench press.

January 26, 2026
Why Good Salsa Matters

In 1967, my father took me to the grand opening of a Taco Bell in San Jose, California. This was my first encounter with fast food as spectacle—and with teenagers as a category of human being. They stood behind the registers in a loose formation, and every one of them appeared to be afflicted with the same alarming facial condition. Spots everywhere. An outbreak.

I was five. I did the math available to me. Had a disease swept through the workforce? Did Taco Bell exposure cause lesions? Were the refried beans radioactive?

I asked my father what was wrong with their faces.

“They’re pimples,” he said. Then, without hesitation, he added, “According to Aristotle, God gives pimples to teenagers to teach them humility.”

I knew immediately this was untrue. Not because I had read Aristotle—I hadn’t—but because I knew my father. This was him doing what he loved most: inventing authority on the spot. He also harbored a low-grade contempt for teenagers, whom he regarded as overconfident and undercooked. Acne, in his view, was divine pushback. Cosmic slapstick.

The pimples unsettled me, but they did not interfere with my appetite. I ate my tacos and frijoles under the Taco Bell canopy, admiring the beige stone “Mexican” architecture—the aesthetic equivalent of a sombrero on a filing cabinet. The food itself was a novelty. We didn’t eat Mexican food, and Taco Bell certainly wasn’t Mexican food, but it was a portal. A gateway drug.

Within a few years, my mother was making tacos, burritos, and enchiladas at home. Our Mexican-American neighbors, Mike and Felice Orozco, made salsa from ingredients grown in our own backyards. The salsa lived on the coffee table in a volcanic tureen, like something sacred and faintly dangerous. You could smell it the moment you walked into the living room—chilies, onions, garlic, alive and unapologetic.

The color stopped you. A deep ruby red. Not restaurant red. Not industrial red. Real red. I have eaten excellent salsa over the decades, but nothing has ever matched the salsa Felice Orozco taught my mother to make in the late 1960s. Even now, if a Mexican restaurant brings out a pre-meal salsa that approaches that standard—even halfway—I take it as a sign of moral seriousness.

Felice Orozco’s salsa wasn’t just delicious. It was philosophical. It carried an unspoken argument about what survives and what matters. When families pass down food traditions, they’re saying something quietly radical: some knowledge deserves care, repetition, and fidelity. This isn’t about novelty or performance. It’s not about artisanal swagger or bragging rights. It’s about love made practical. Wisdom with onions.

So what was Taco Bell to me as a child? A desecration of Mexican food? No. It was a signpost. A crude outpost with a faint aroma of the real thing. It pointed toward a richer city beyond itself—a place where food meant connection, where flavors carried memory and generosity.

The sign didn’t point south.
It pointed to Felice Orozco’s house.

January 26, 2026
The Potato Diet and the Gospel According to Mel Brooks

Recently, I fell down a nutritional rabbit hole and emerged clutching a potato. Not just any potato, but the cooked-then-cooled kind—Idaho and sweet potatoes transformed into resistant starch, that miraculous category of food that sounds like it should be protesting something. Resistant starch, I learned, behaves like a probiotic: it feeds the gut microbiome, supports immunity, improves metabolic health, lowers cholesterol, and may reduce colorectal cancer risk. It even helps regulate appetite hormones, which is a polite way of saying it tells your brain to stop behaving like a feral raccoon.

There’s a whole taxonomy of resistant-starch foods, but I’m a simple man. I’m focusing on potatoes. I eat them cold from the fridge or gently reheated. Lunch and dinner get a potato. Snacks get a yam blended into yogurt like some deranged Thanksgiving parfait. If it’s an Idaho potato, I dress it up with plain Greek yogurt, nutritional yeast, and a reckless amount of herbs and spices. This is what refinement looks like in 2026.

So far, the results have been suspiciously positive. I feel energized. My gut feels calm and cooperative. I enjoy the strange pleasure of eating potatoes at all hours of the day. The real stars, though, are the yams and sweet potatoes—especially the purple Japanese sweet potatoes, which look like food designed by a medieval alchemist with a sense of humor.

Then came today.

On the Schwinn Airdyne, I felt… powerful. Not delusional powerful. Not “I should enter a CrossFit competition” powerful. Just quietly, inexorably strong. I burned 825 calories in 62 minutes. The last time I broke 800 calories on that bike was three years ago, back when my joints were younger and my expectations were less realistic.

Do I attribute this personal record to my potato regimen? I don’t know. The potatoes could be a placebo. I could be committing the cardinal sin of confusing correlation with causation. More likely, I just had one of those rare days when physiology, psychology, and stubbornness line up like planets.

I don’t expect to hit 800 calories regularly. Seven hundred is already serious business. Eight hundred requires intent. Eight hundred is a flex. It’s bragging rights territory—the kind of obsessive pursuit Howard Ratner brings to the giant black opal in Uncut Gems, except with less jewelry and more sweat pooling under a stationary bike.

There was another factor, too. Today’s ride was a response to yesterday.

My daughters were at Knott’s Berry Farm. My wife was out seeing Leslie Jones. I usually enjoy solitude, but yesterday it curdled. The headlines were bleak. My creative energy flatlined. The world felt slightly out of phase, like a record spinning at the wrong speed. When things get that dark, my internal soundtrack defaults to King Crimson’s “Epitaph”—a song that sounds like it was written for someone weeping against a stone wall at the end of history.

I got through the night with two documentaries: Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man! and Secret Mall Apartment. One was joyous defiance. The other was a reminder that some people respond to modern despair by secretly building illegal sanctuaries inside dead shopping centers.

Mel Brooks said something that landed with force. Life is hard. We suffer loss. But piling misery on top of misery—indulging self-pity—only deepens the wound.

I took that personally. I suspect the 825-calorie burn was my way of replying: I hear you, Mel. I love you. I’m choosing motion over rumination.

And so I did.

January 25, 2026
Living in the Bottle: A Life Spent Building Cozy Universes

My parents like to remind me that I grew up poor in a cockroach-infested assisted-living situation in Gainesville, Florida. The place was called Flavet Villages—Flavet, if you lived there, which everyone did because there was nowhere else to go. These were not “villages” in any meaningful sense. They were World War II–era Camp Blanding army barracks, uprooted from Jacksonville and dropped into North Florida like surplus history.

What I love, even now, is the audacity of the name. Flavet Villages. It’s a master class in rebranding: take a barracks crawling with roaches and give it a pastoral plural noun. It’s the real-estate equivalent of dabbing Vicks VapoRub on your neck and calling it Menthol d’Après-Minuit.

Flavet sat near an alligator swamp and a stretch of forest that felt mythic to me, even then. A Mynah bird lived there—always on the same branch, like a sentry or an oracle—and before bedtime my father and I would walk to the edge of the woods and talk to it. At dusk, the tide dropped, and the swamp revealed itself. Alligator dung, fully expressed. The smell was feral and unmistakable. While most people would recoil, I found it oddly soothing—bracing, even. As if the universe were saying, You’re here. This is real.

As a native Floridian, I sometimes wonder—with a perverse sense of pride—whether my early exposure to fecal alligator swamps permanently rewired my sensory thresholds in ways outsiders could never understand.

One evening, as my father and I stood at the forest’s edge, we heard a distant radio playing Juanita Hall’s rendition of “Bali Ha’i” from South Pacific. The song is about an island paradise that seems achingly close yet forever unreachable, and it’s meant to induce longing and melancholy. But I felt none of that. Paradise was already present. I was standing in an enchanted forest with my storytelling father, a talking bird, mythical alligators nearby, and music drifting in like a siren call. This was not longing; this was habitation. I lived in a fairy tale and had no interest in leaving it.

That same ache—for a magical enclosure—returned when I was five and living in the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose. The grounds were landscaped with sunflowers and volcanic rock, and as I walked to the playground I would stare at the flower beds and wish I could shrink myself down to Lilliputian size and live inside them forever. That was my first lesson in coziness: the idea that a small, bounded world could feel safer, richer, and more alive than the vast one surrounding it.

Then came I Dream of Jeannie. Barbara Eden’s blonde goddess lived inside a genie bottle—a jewel-lined cocoon with a purple circular sofa and pink satin pillows glowing like some erotic reliquary. More than anything, I wanted to live in that bottle with her. The impossibility of that wish crushed me with the same quiet sadness as “Bali Ha’i.” That the bottle was, in reality, a painted Jim Beam decanter only deepened the metaphor. I was intoxicated by fantasy long before I understood the word.

Flavet Village, the swamp forest, the Royal Lanai flower beds, Jeannie’s bottle—these were all variations on the same theme: cozy ecosystems that stood apart from the real world while quietly shaping how I understood it. Without those parallel universes, reality would have been flatter, harsher, less survivable.

Now, in my sixties, I’ve built a new ecosystem: my watch world. A watch box holding seven watches that I tend like a mother hen, fretting over straps and bracelets, endlessly optimizing the rotation to extract maximum pleasure from time itself. It’s a controlled universe, one I can enter when the outside world becomes too loud or incoherent. I always come back—but I’m aware of the danger. The pull can be strong. Swapping a Tropic strap for a Waffle may calm me in the moment, but eventually I have to step out of the bottle, leave the forest, and reenter a world that demands attention, judgment, and responsibility.

The fantasy sustains me. It just can’t replace the world.

January 25, 2026