I was in a cult once. That was a long time ago. My time with them began about 24 years ago, although pinpointing the exact year has proven to be slippery for me. My time with them came to a close around five years after joining. I find myself thinking about them often. They called themselves "The World's Greatest." We were anything but, of course, which was kind of the joke after a while. Yet, in retrospect the name served a purpose. When we called ourselves "The World's Greatest," amid self-aware chuckles and incriminating sidelong glances at one another, there was still something... aspirational about the title. Whether or not we actually were the world's greatest was debatable. Greatest at what? How was that measured? Who said so? It still gave us something to aim for. The World's Greatest was an exclusive, invitation-only membership with a strict color-specific dress code, and whose members were each responsible for upholding a single piece o...
SERIES OF SHOTS: A spry, middle-aged man wakes up before sunrise. Reaching over to the bedside table, he puts on his glasses. He springs from bed, and begins a series of robust stretches and lunges in his clean bedroom—which, though small, is well-kept, affording him plenty of space for his lunging exercises. He sways and bends from the hips. Rotating his pelvis. He arches his back, far backward—then forward—like an exaggerated dance, though with no set beat or rhythm. Random. Swaying. With gusto. A single photograph hangs framed on the wall. It's an old picture of a young boy standing beside an old man. Very formal. They stand beside each other, arms at their sides, next to a young sapling, freshly planted in the ground. The man looks at the picture between lunges. Between stretches which increasingly move his entire body's posture in extravagant poses in his room, dawn growing outside. Later, in the kitchen. Though he is fit, we see him extract a whole pa...
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