Cinemorphosis

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  • The Warrior Waiting Outside My Classroom

    The Warrior Waiting Outside My Classroom

    You can begin with the proposition that helping others is one of the few reliable antidotes to the degrading swamp of self-pity. Human beings are not designed to sit motionless inside their own grievances indefinitely. If you possess intelligence, talent, strength, or charisma, those gifts demand meaningful expression. They are not decorative features. They are forms of energy.

    That energy animates your being like electrical current running through a machine. It must move outward toward purpose, discipline, service, creation, or struggle. If it cannot find meaningful release, it turns inward and begins poisoning the person who contains it. The result is psychic rot: floundering, festering, curdling resentment, compulsive behavior, addiction, rage, nihilism, and self-consumption. The gifted person without purpose often becomes a danger to himself. He drinks greedily from the trough of self-pity until he sinks into a stagnant emotional mire.

    I have been thinking about this principle of repressed talent for the last month or so.

    When I walk to teach my classes at the college, I often pass a group of four young men gathered outside the classroom next to mine, waiting for their instructor to arrive. Among them is a young man I will call Lance. Even standing still, Lance commands attention with the gravitational pull of someone built for collision rather than passivity.

    He is in his mid-twenties, about six foot four, perhaps 230 pounds, heavily muscled and covered in tattoos. His blond hair is shaved close against his skull, emphasizing a sculpted jaw that looks almost mythic in proportion. Behind thick black-rimmed glasses are serious eyes carrying the alertness of a man who has spent years expecting conflict. Lance possesses the unmistakable physical presence of someone who could either lead men into battle or get thrown out of a casino at three in the morning for fighting three bouncers simultaneously.

    He told me he moved to California from Michigan after years of self-destruction that resulted in several felony convictions. He admitted openly that he struggles with aggression and anger. He appears to possess almost no tolerance for stupidity, dishonesty, or weakness. Yet despite the volatility simmering beneath the surface, he also projects unusual charisma and intelligence. He is studying business now and trying, in his own words, to “get his life together.”

    From my limited conversations with him, I suspect Lance possesses what I would call a Warrior Personality.

    Some people are psychologically constructed for intensity. They thrive on challenge, competition, danger, pressure, confrontation, and high-stakes environments that demand disciplined aggression. These individuals often deteriorate in passive, stagnant, emotionally neutered settings. They require struggle the way racehorses require motion. If they fail to find meaningful outlets for their intensity, the energy mutates into self-destruction.

    I can easily imagine Lance succeeding as an athlete, coach, entrepreneur, counselor, firefighter, or leader in some other high-pressure field requiring resilience and force of will. But I can equally imagine him drifting toward destruction if that energy remains undirected.

    What concerns me is what I would call Warrior Displacement Syndrome: a condition in which highly aggressive, competitive, high-intensity individuals fail to discover purposeful outlets for their temperament and therefore redirect those impulses toward addiction, criminality, rage, compulsive behavior, or nihilism. The warrior instinct, denied honorable expression, mutates into chaos.

    Modern society often misunderstands such people. We frequently pathologize intensity itself rather than helping channel it constructively. But strength without direction becomes volatile. A powerful temperament deprived of purpose becomes psychologically radioactive.

    Lance still has rough edges that he will likely need to soften as he adapts to adult life. Yet I suspect much of his struggle comes not from an excess of strength but from the absence of a worthy battlefield upon which to deploy it.

    There are two weeks left in the semester. If I see Lance outside my classroom again, I may tell him some version of what I have written here. Perhaps the idea of the Warrior Personality will resonate with him. Perhaps not.

    But increasingly I suspect that in another version of my life, I would not have become a college writing instructor at all.

    I would have become a counselor for lost men trying to redirect the dangerous energy burning inside them before it consumed them whole.

  • Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Since the COVID lockdown, most of my teaching has migrated online. Even now, roughly three-fourths of my courses remain in the digital realm, where students encounter me less as a flesh-and-blood professor pacing beneath fluorescent lights and more as a disembodied presence living inside Canvas announcements, discussion boards, and video lectures recorded in my home office.

    To my surprise, retention rates remain strong. That fact alone suggests online learning serves a real need for many students whose lives resemble logistical hostage situations involving jobs, childcare, commutes, aging parents, unstable work schedules, and economic exhaustion. For these students, online education is not a luxury. It is the only doorway left open.

    Still, online learning clearly is not for everyone.

    Today’s Los Angeles Times article, “‘I felt like I wasn’t learning’: Community college students struggle with online education” by Adam Echelman, highlights several genuine problems now reshaping higher education.

    First, nearly 40 percent of community college classes are online, leaving many campuses eerily underpopulated. I see this myself every time I walk across campus beneath giant stretches of empty concrete where student traffic once resembled an airport terminal. Some days the college feels less like a thriving institution of learning and more like the abandoned set of a post-apocalyptic indie film where only the squirrels still believe enrollment is healthy.

    Second, online education is highly vulnerable to AI-assisted academic dishonesty. Entire assignments can now be outsourced to machines with frightening ease. Students who once copied homework from friends can now summon instant essays, summaries, reflections, and discussion-board responses generated in seconds by software that never sleeps and never complains about deadlines. Academic rigor has unquestionably been destabilized.

    Third, many students experience profound disorientation in online courses. They sit alone at glowing screens trying to decode unfamiliar interfaces, navigate modules, interpret assignment instructions, and manage deadlines without the immediate human structure of a physical classroom. Some students thrive in this environment. Others feel psychologically untethered, as though they have been dropped into an educational escape room with no map and unreliable Wi-Fi.

    All of these criticisms contain truth.

    But I still feel compelled to defend online education because face-to-face instruction creates its own formidable barriers that critics often romanticize away.

    Many students simply do not possess the time, transportation, money, childcare, emotional bandwidth, or scheduling flexibility necessary to attend traditional classes several times a week. Others suffer from social anxiety so severe that walking into a crowded classroom feels less like entering a learning environment and more like arriving for public execution. Some students experience the same confusion staring at a printed syllabus that others experience navigating Canvas. Confusion is not unique to online learning; it is part of learning itself.

    And AI has disrupted all education, not merely online education.

    The fantasy that we can restore some pristine pre-pandemic classroom paradise by dragging everyone back into physical seats ignores reality entirely. Face-to-face classes are also saturated with AI. Students use it in dorm rooms, libraries, cafeterias, parking lots, and sometimes while sitting directly in front of us pretending to take notes. The disruption is universal.

    We are living through a historical transition in which educators are desperately trying to preserve critical thinking, reading, writing, and job preparation while technological conditions mutate faster than institutional bureaucracy can respond. No one possesses perfect answers. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling nostalgia disguised as certainty.

    But I remain optimistic.

    Online teaching continues improving. Faculty are becoming more sophisticated in course design, communication, engagement strategies, video instruction, accessibility, and platform navigation. We are learning how to create clearer modules, more interactive coursework, better communication systems, and stronger student support structures. In many cases, students now receive the best aspects of both worlds: the flexibility of online access combined with increasingly refined teaching methods.

    And flexibility matters enormously.

    For many community college students, education is squeezed into the margins of adult survival. They complete assignments after ten-hour shifts, during lunch breaks, inside parked cars, while supervising children, or late at night after the household finally quiets down. Critics who romanticize the traditional campus experience often imagine eighteen-year-olds strolling across ivy-covered quads discussing philosophy beneath oak trees. Community college reality is far less cinematic. It involves exhaustion, economic pressure, and scheduling warfare.

    All of higher education is undergoing massive disruption simultaneously:

    • AI is transforming intellectual labor.
    • Student attention spans are changing.
    • Economic pressures are intensifying.
    • Online teaching technologies are improving.
    • Work and family demands are growing more brutal.

    Under these conditions, demanding a wholesale return to “the old ways” feels less like wisdom and more like denial.

    The old world is not coming back.

    That does not mean standards should collapse or that online learning is automatically superior. It means education must evolve alongside the lives students actually live rather than the lives institutions nostalgically wish they still lived.

    Online education will continue improving because necessity drives innovation with ruthless efficiency. Likewise, our understanding of how to create meaningful, rigorous, and humane education in the AI Age will continue evolving. We are not witnessing the death of learning. We are witnessing the painful reconstruction of it.

    The task now is not retreat. It is adaptation.

    It is time to move forward rather than cling romantically to a vanished academic world that technology, economics, and history have already left behind.

  • Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    I shouldn’t indulge in self-pity or perform the aging writer’s ritual of staring mournfully into the middle distance while pretending the universe failed to recognize his genius. I have much to be grateful for. Still, as retirement approaches, I feel obligated to conduct a private audit of my creative life, and the results are complicated.

    At this stage, I imagined I would feel artistically established, as though decades of writing would eventually crystallize into some stable literary identity. Instead, every morning I wake up and begin again from scratch like a man rebuilding a sandcastle the tide erased overnight. I sit before the keyboard hoping language will once again perform its small daily miracle.

    To my credit, I recently completed a collection of eleven stories. That matters. The stories revolve around men whose obsessions slowly consume them: bodybuilders, hedonists, nihilists, dandies, counterfeit aristocrats, and assorted spiritual casualties wandering through the desert of modern American masculinity. I titled the collection What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?—which sounds either appropriately biblical or like the warning label on an energy drink marketed to divorced men in sports cars.

    The stories took years to finish because they were rewritten endlessly. Rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of rewrites. Entire paragraphs were dismantled and reconstructed so many times they resembled neighborhoods destroyed by artillery fire and rebuilt brick by brick. Yet I am grateful for the struggle because the stories finally feel as though they exist in the form they were always trying to reach. The characters and scenarios have haunted me for decades, lingering in my imagination like unresolved ghosts demanding literary exorcism. Finishing the book feels less like triumph than relief.

    I harbor no fantasy that these stories will suddenly launch me into literary celebrity. To keep myself psychologically grounded, I think about Rick Bass and his story collection The Watch from the 1990s. Those stories struck me as wild, profound, and emotionally unhinged in the best possible way—worthy of Gogol or Chekhov—yet Bass never ascended into the literary superstardom our culture reserves for a tiny handful of writers. He flourished artistically while remaining, to the broader public, relatively obscure.

    But obscurity is crowded with greatness.

    I think too of one of my favorite bands, The Trash Can Sinatras. I still remember standing inside a grimy T-shirt store on Hollywood Boulevard flipping through posters of The Smiths and Morrissey when “Obscurity Knocks” came over the speakers. The song hit me with such strange emotional precision that I immediately bought their album Cake and became a devotee for life.

    And yet did The Trash Can Sinatras become massively famous? Hardly.

    They nearly disappeared altogether before a small but stubborn online following revived them in the early 2000s. They continue making music today with almost monastic devotion despite occupying only a microscopic corner of the attention economy. As I write this, their official YouTube channel has roughly 3,500 subscribers—a number that feels morally absurd when one considers the beauty and intelligence of their music. In the metrics of the modern algorithmic carnival, they reside near the basement. In my mind, they stand near the summit.

    But perhaps my indignation itself reveals the problem.

    I keep imposing upon artists an American mythology that has been drilled into my brain since childhood: the myth of the self-made man. In this story, success arrives as visible conquest. The hero works relentlessly, overcomes humiliation and doubt, climbs the mountain, and finally receives public veneration, wealth, applause, and symbolic immortality. The crowd cheers. The parade begins. The nectar is consumed.

    Except reality rarely behaves this way.

    Many artists labor for decades, sharpen their craft, discover their authentic voice, and produce extraordinary work only to become beloved by small circles of devoted admirers rather than the masses. They are not failures. The dice simply landed where they landed. They flourished artistically without the bestseller list, Netflix adaptation, sold-out stadium, or blue-check coronation from the gods of cultural relevance.

    Even Dante Alighieri died in relative hardship. History later built the cathedral.

    As an American raised on success mythology—from Horatio Alger fantasies to that smug little children’s story about the train repeating “I think I can”—I find it difficult to fully abandon the fantasy that hard work eventually produces not merely accomplishment but wholeness. Somewhere deep inside me remains the childish belief that if I simply grind long enough, write hard enough, revise carefully enough, and suffer nobly enough, some grand validation ceremony awaits at the end.

    But one of the greatest scenes in The Wire dismantles that illusion with brutal clarity. Detective Lester Freamon warns Jimmy McNulty that police work will not save him. There is no grand parade waiting. No expensive watch. No final moment where the universe declares the suffering worthwhile. Lester tells him plainly: “This job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole.”

    That line haunts me because it applies to almost everything Americans worship.

    Career.
    Status.
    Achievement.
    Recognition.
    Fame.
    Productivity.

    We imagine these things will rescue us from our unfinished selves. But Lester understands the deeper truth: life is happening elsewhere while we wait for the grand moment of validation that never fully arrives. As he says, life is “the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

    What does it mean, then, to “get a life”?

    Perhaps it means accepting that there is no final coronation waiting beyond the horizon. No guaranteed fanfare. No cosmic scoreboard fairly distributing glory according to merit. Perhaps maturity means seeing clearly that art is not a vending machine where years of labor reliably produce fame and transcendence. Sometimes the reward is simply the work itself, the strange companionship of characters who haunted you into existence, and the small circle of people who genuinely understand what you made.

    Perhaps that has to be enough.

  • Learning to Speak Rich

    Learning to Speak Rich

    Known publicly as bell hooks in honor of her grandmother, hooks explores in her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” a deeply conflicted relationship with education, class mobility, race, and selfhood. Her story is not a simple celebration of academic success. It is the story of a woman who discovers that entering elite educational spaces often demands a painful reshaping—even partial erasure—of the self.

    hooks describes growing up in a deeply religious working-class black family defined by economic scarcity and moral restraint. Her parents taught her not to expect luxury, comfort, or indulgence. Desire itself carried a faint odor of danger and shame. Material appetites were viewed not as healthy ambitions but as temptations capable of corrupting the soul. As a result, hooks explains that she learned “the art of sublimation and repression,” training herself to suppress wants, ambitions, and emotional needs in the name of survival and moral discipline.

    When she entered college close to home, she found herself stranded in an overwhelmingly white social environment populated by affluent young women whose values seemed completely foreign to her own. Many of these students treated her with ridicule, cruelty, and casual contempt. hooks describes them almost as alien life forms—young women so economically secure and psychologically entitled that they moved through the world with complete confidence in their own importance. They expressed their desires openly and unapologetically, behaving as though comfort, pleasure, beauty, and success were their birthrights.

    To the young hooks, raised in a culture of modesty and self-denial, this behavior was shocking. She associated upper-class aspiration with vanity, ostentation, envy, and cruelty. Yet she also recognized that these women possessed a kind of social confidence unavailable to her own world of repression and apology. Their existence revealed how class shapes not only material conditions but body language, speech, appetite, ambition, and assumptions about one’s place in the world.

    Not all of the white students fit this mold. hooks found friendship with several women from modest economic backgrounds who shared her skepticism toward vanity and excess. These relationships gave her temporary relief from the alienation surrounding her.

    Still miserable at the college, hooks encountered an English professor educated at Stanford University who encouraged her to leave and attend Stanford instead. Her parents reacted with terror. To them, California represented a modern Babylon where humility dissolved into narcissism, vanity, materialism, and sinful desire. Yet hooks could not imagine remaining at the all-white college. Stanford at least offered the possibility of intellectual and racial community, so she persuaded her parents to let her go west.

    Stanford overwhelmed her senses immediately. The campus radiated wealth, ambition, appetite, and institutional power. The architecture itself seemed to proclaim that greatness—especially economic greatness—was the natural destiny of those who studied there. hooks realized quickly that elite universities do not merely educate students academically; they train them socially and psychologically for membership within elite classes. Networking, status management, and the performance of confidence were woven into the institution’s culture as thoroughly as lectures and exams.

    The message Stanford communicated was unmistakable: if you were already wealthy, your job was to become even wealthier and more powerful. If you were poor, your task was to abandon the habits, assumptions, insecurities, and cultural signals associated with poverty and remake yourself in the image of the elite.

    Although hooks found less overt racism at Stanford, she encountered something she found equally disturbing: unapologetic class contempt. Wealthy students and professors openly mocked and dismissed working-class people. She recalls hearing students speak about poorer Americans with startling derision, as though poverty itself reflected stupidity, vulgarity, or moral failure.

    Most shocking to hooks was discovering that this elitism extended into segments of the black intellectual community as well. She describes encountering members of the “black diaspora” who displayed the same contempt toward the poor and working class that she had seen among affluent whites. Poverty was treated not merely as an economic condition but as a psychological defect requiring correction and purification. hooks realized that race alone did not guarantee solidarity; class divisions fractured black communities from within.

    Over time, hooks came to believe that academic success for poor students often requires a painful form of self-renunciation. To become educated within elite institutions meant learning new codes of speech, dress, posture, behavior, and intellectual performance. One had to absorb the language and cultural signals of the privileged classes while distancing oneself from working-class origins. In effect, students from poorer backgrounds often succeed only by engaging in a kind of controlled self-erasure.

    Education, then, becomes morally complicated. It is not simply enlightenment or liberation. It is also performance. Mimicry. Adaptation. Sycophancy. Reinvention.

    By the time hooks earned her doctorate and became a professor herself, she felt not uncomplicated pride but deep ambivalence. She had entered the world of privilege while remaining emotionally loyal to the working-class culture that shaped her identity. She occupied elite academic spaces while refusing to sever her connection to the people and values from which she came.

    I have had the privilege of teaching hooks’ essays to college students since the 1980s—across five different decades of teaching. Of all her works, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” remains my favorite because it exposes the emotional and psychological costs hidden beneath the mythology of higher education.

    Next semester, I plan to assign an essay asking students to evaluate the claim that hooks ultimately portrays higher education as a process requiring painful self-transformation. According to this interpretation, success in college often demands that students distance themselves from their past, imitate the language and cultural behaviors of professors and elites, and absorb the social signals associated with wealth and status. Education therefore becomes not merely intellectual growth, but a complicated mixture of genuine learning, shame, performance, ambition, self-betrayal, and social reinvention.

    Here is the 1,000-word argumentative essay prompt:

    In her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” bell hooks presents higher education not simply as a path toward knowledge and liberation, but as a psychologically painful process of social transformation. As a working-class black woman moving through predominantly white and elite educational spaces, hooks experiences education as both empowering and alienating. She discovers that academic success often requires students from poorer or marginalized backgrounds to adopt new forms of speech, dress, behavior, ambition, and self-presentation associated with wealth and class privilege. At times, this transformation feels less like intellectual growth and more like self-erasure.

    hooks argues that elite colleges and universities do more than teach information. They also train students to perform class identity. Students learn not only what to think, but how to speak, dress, network, express ambition, suppress insecurity, and project confidence in ways that signal belonging within elite professional culture. For hooks, the process becomes morally complicated because upward mobility often demands distance from one’s family, working-class roots, cultural identity, or former self. Success may require what hooks describes as forms of repression, performance, mimicry, and reinvention.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you evaluate the following claim:

    To become successful and “educated” within elite academic culture, students from working-class or marginalized backgrounds often feel pressure to reinvent themselves by adopting the language, behaviors, attitudes, and social codes of the privileged classes, even when doing so creates feelings of shame, alienation, self-betrayal, or disconnection from their past.

    In your essay, analyze how hooks portrays education as both liberating and psychologically costly. To what extent do you agree with her argument? Does higher education genuinely expand human freedom and opportunity, or does it pressure students into performing a new identity in order to gain acceptance and success? Is adapting to elite academic culture a necessary form of growth and professional development, or does it require students to abandon important parts of themselves?

    As you develop your argument, you may consider some of the following questions:

    • How do class, race, and economic background shape a student’s experience in college?
    • What social “codes” do elite universities teach beyond academics?
    • Is there a difference between education and social performance?
    • Does professional success require conformity?
    • Can students remain loyal to their working-class roots while entering elite institutions?
    • Does higher education reward authenticity or performance?
    • Is self-reinvention a healthy form of growth or a form of self-betrayal?
    • How do speech, clothing, confidence, networking, and cultural tastes function as markers of class?
    • Are elite universities spaces of liberation, assimilation, or both?

    You may use personal observations, contemporary examples, films, books, interviews, or other sources to support your argument. Possible connections could include social media culture, networking culture, corporate professionalism, influencer culture, first-generation college experiences, code-switching, or the pressure to cultivate a “successful” personal brand.

    Requirements:

    • Clear argumentative thesis
    • At least three mapping components in the thesis
    • Counterargument and rebuttal
    • Specific references to hooks’ essay
    • MLA format
    • Approximately 1,000 words

    Your goal is not merely to summarize hooks’ experiences, but to evaluate the larger argument her essay makes about education, class mobility, identity, and the hidden emotional costs of social advancement.

  • The Cage Fight Republic

    The Cage Fight Republic

    There will be a cage fight on the White House lawn. Pause for a moment and absorb the sentence like a man discovering raccoons fighting in the baptismal font of a cathedral. Do not feel embarrassed if your mind immediately drifts toward the Fall of Rome. Historians spent centuries imagining civilization collapsing beneath barbarian invasions, moral decay, and imperial excess. Few predicted it would arrive draped in pay-per-view aesthetics, influencer branding, and energy-drink masculinity.

    What does a cage fight at the White House actually signify?

    It signifies that we are no longer functioning as a nation of adults. We are a nation of emotionally overstimulated adolescents sorted into hostile lifestyle cliques that glare at one another through glowing algorithmic windows. We no longer possess a shared civic culture grounded in restraint, seriousness, or critical thought. Instead, we perform identities. Politics has become an extension of influencer culture where the central goal is not governance, persuasion, or wisdom, but domination of the attention economy.

    The cage fight is not merely entertainment. It is symbolic theater. It codes to an entire lifestyle ecosystem built around aggression, masculine branding, tribal loyalty, and public humiliation as spectacle. It tells millions of people: This is power now. This is leadership. This is what seriousness looks like in the Age of Clout.

    Imagine the counterfactual. Suppose the ruling tribe consisted of affluent New Age wellness mystics from Marin County. The White House lawn would not host a cage fight. It would feature a guided meditation followed by a demonstration on preparing turmeric-infused plant-based pad Thai while ambient flute music drifted through the rose garden. The spectacle would be different, but the underlying pathology would remain the same: politics reduced to lifestyle signaling for competing narcissistic tribes.

    That is what modern America increasingly resembles—not a republic of citizens, but a federation of branded identities.

    Influencer culture has swallowed politics whole. Governance now competes with spectacle and usually loses. Complex realities requiring maturity, patience, expertise, and long-term thinking are bulldozed aside by tribal performance rituals engineered for virality. The purpose of public life is no longer solving problems but humiliating rival cliques in front of an audience.

    Meanwhile, reality continues operating with terrifying indifference to our social-media psychodramas.

    Ebola spreads through the Congo. Global instability intensifies. Public health systems strain under pressure. International crises require coordination, seriousness, and institutional competence. But a civilization addicted to clout interprets even catastrophe through the lens of performance and tribal signaling. Foreign aid becomes not a strategic necessity or humanitarian obligation, but an opportunity for symbolic muscle-flexing—to “own” the opposing tribe with maximum theatrical contempt.

    This is the deeper meaning of the White House cage fight.

    It is not simply vulgar. America has always possessed vulgarity. It is something worse: the collapse of adulthood itself. We increasingly approach politics the way middle-school students approach cafeteria warfare—emotionally reactive, tribal, narcissistic, and desperate for peer validation.

    So when you watch the spectacle unfold on the White House lawn, remember that the cage surrounding the fighters is not merely steel fencing. It is the visible architecture of a civilization slowly converting itself into content.

  • Growing Up Obsessed with Barbara Eden

    Growing Up Obsessed with Barbara Eden

    As a kid growing up in the 60s, I became obsessed with I Dream of Jeannie.

    Obsessed may actually be too mild a word.

    I knew every episode by heart. I could anticipate each joke, each misunderstanding, each twitch of Jeannie’s magical powers. None of this diminished my devotion. I was hopelessly enthralled by Jeannie herself, played by Barbara Eden.

    Eventually she began visiting me in dreams.

    Whenever she appeared, beautiful aching music accompanied her presence. She would float through my bedroom window, take my hand, and carry me around the world to exotic destinations glowing beneath moonlight. When I awoke, I could still smell her lingering in the room—honey, sweat, nectar, patchouli—the impossible perfume of longing itself.

    The dreams continued throughout my childhood.

    Then one day I encountered two beautiful sisters, and after that encounter Jeannie stopped visiting me in my dreams forever.

    This story is about those sisters.

    It happened during the spring of 1973 on a warm California afternoon after sixth grade classes had ended. The school bus dropped us off near Crow Canyon Road, and several of us wandered across the street to the local 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees before making the miserable uphill trek home along Greenridge Road.

    Inside the store, the radio was playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” that melancholy yacht-rock masterpiece about romantic disappointment disguised as cheerful singalong music. The frozen-drink machines hummed. The air smelled of sugar syrup, cardboard pizza, and asphalt baking in the afternoon heat.

    That was when the Horsefault sisters entered.

    They were impossible not to notice.

    One was in eighth grade, the other already a sophomore in high school. Both had long blonde hair, freckles, high cheekbones, and mischievous blue eyes that radiated the dangerous energy of girls who enjoyed creating problems merely to see what would happen next. To my sixth-grade brain, they resembled slightly feral versions of Barbara Eden.

    One of them smiled at me and asked:

    “Do you want to see our rabbit?”

    Now, to be clear, I had absolutely no interest in rabbits.

    Had two pimply boys invited me to inspect a caged rodent behind a farmhouse, I would have fled instantly while clutching my cherry Slurpee in terror. But these were beautiful older girls, and beautiful older girls possess the supernatural ability to make adolescent boys enthusiastically volunteer for situations that would otherwise trigger police investigations.

    “Yes,” I said immediately. “I’d love to see the rabbit.”

    Naturally.

    So I followed them.

    We left the 7-Eleven parking lot and walked perhaps a hundred yards down a dusty trail lined with dry horse manure and tall grass swaying in the afternoon breeze. Beyond the field stood their weathered farmhouse, half hidden behind eucalyptus trees and fencing. The place had the unsettling atmosphere of a rural fairy tale where attractive maidens lure travelers into barns never to be heard from again.

    Behind a thicket of bushes stood the rabbit cage.

    It was large enough to imprison a medium-sized farm animal—or an unsuspecting sixth grader. The cage door hung slightly open, and a heavy chain lock dangled ominously from the latch.

    I peered inside.

    No rabbit.

    At that exact moment the sisters burst into shrieking laughter and lunged at me.

    They grabbed my arms and tried to shove me into the cage.

    The truth arrived instantly and with horrifying clarity: there had never been a rabbit. The rabbit was merely bait. I had walked directly into an ambush orchestrated by two hormonally deranged Valkyries whose apparent goal was to lock me inside a cage and transform me into some sort of suburban hostage.

    But they had underestimated me.

    At eleven years old I was already deep into my future bodybuilding destiny and absurdly strong for my age. What followed was less an abduction than a full-contact barnyard wrestling match. We grappled outside the cage rolling through dry grass, hay, and dirt while clouds of dust exploded around us like scenes from a low-budget western.

    Nearby chickens erupted into chaos.

    Inside the coop they flapped wildly, clucked hysterically, and hurled themselves about with the alarm of creatures witnessing either a murder or a satanic fertility ritual.

    The sisters were laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Sweat darkened their halter tops and cutoffs as they struggled unsuccessfully to overpower me. Eventually, exhausted and defeated, they abandoned the mission.

    The moment their grip weakened, I escaped.

    I sprinted home outraged.

    Not merely embarrassed—outraged.

    They had attempted to steal my freedom.

    I stormed into the living room and did what I always did when emotionally overwhelmed by the complexities of existence: I turned on I Dream of Jeannie.

    That night Jeannie came to me one final time.

    As always, she floated silently through my bedroom window accompanied by that beautiful aching music that seemed to emerge from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

    But this time something was different.

    She looked sad.

    “The Horsefault sisters want you now,” she explained softly. “It’s time for you to return their affections. They are real girls. Girls who do not drift through bedroom windows inside moonlit clouds.”

    I argued desperately.

    I told her I loved her.

    But she only smiled with melancholy tenderness before slowly retreating backward into a gray mist that swallowed her completely.

    Then she vanished forever.

    After that night, the dreams changed.

    No more Jeannie.

    No more moonlit flights across the world.

    Instead my dreams became feverish and earthly. They featured rabbit cages beneath silver moonlight, hayfields trembling in the wind, and sweat-soaked girls in cutoffs and halter tops chasing me through cornfields while laughing hysterically.

    “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” they cried.

    Over and over.

    And just like that, childhood fantasy gave way to adolescent bewilderment.

    I never watched I Dream of Jeannie again.

  • The Lost Men of Hobcallow

    The Lost Men of Hobcallow

    At first, my colleagues in the small town generously excused my increasingly bizarre wardrobe as “youthful exuberance.” I was a young Bay Area transplant trying to assert some “big city” flair in a desert outpost where fashion trends arrived three decades late. But one fateful day, I pushed the boundaries beyond reason. I strutted into the campus like a peacock ready for a ballroom dance-off, dressed in tight navy blue Girbaud slacks that practically screamed, “I’m here to give a lecture, but I might also break into interpretive dance.” My feet were clad in velveteen Italian loafers, complete with tassels and tiny bells—yes, bells. Who needs socks when you’ve got bells? 

    But the crown jewel of this sartorial disaster—was the sage-whisper green pirate shirt. And when I say “pirate shirt,” I’m not talking about a whimsical Halloween costume. I’m talking about a translucent, billowing monstrosity that looked like it was plucked from the wardrobe of Captain Jack Sparrow after a particularly wild night of plundering. My bulging pecs were practically hosting their own TED Talk through the sheer fabric, and the effect was more Moulin Rouge than Macbeth.

    By the time the English Department Chair, Moses Okoro, finally called me into his office, his patience had clearly evaporated. He looked at me not as one looks at a colleague, but as one studies a raccoon that has somehow wandered into a faculty meeting wearing cologne.

    I walked in, and there was Moses sitting behind his desk. His feet were ensconced in some sort of luxurious foot-warmer device, a necessary accessory for his gout. He flashed me a grin that was half-amused, half-pitying like a man witnessing someone try to cook a steak with a hairdryer.

    “Jeff,” he began, in a tone that suggested he was both fond of me and horrified by me. “You’re a striking figure, I’ll give you that. But this—” he gestured vaguely at the shimmering diaphanous green pirate shirt draped over my torso—“is taking things too far. I can see more than I care to.” 

    I glanced down at my exposed chest and, for the first time, realized that my pecs were starring in their own soap opera under that filmy fabric. Moses continued, “I get it—a man with your bodybuilding prowess wants to flaunt it. But, Jeff, this is an academic setting, not Studio Fifty-Four. Be more of a professor and less of a Desert Peacock.”

    He then instructed me to march straight home, ditch the pirate couture, and return dressed in something befitting a person who isn’t auditioning for a Vegas show. Before I could slink away in shame, Moses added with a smile, “Jeff, I like you. You’ve got potential. But let me remind you, this town is a fishbowl. Whatever you do in the morning, the whole town knows by lunchtime.”

    That was the Hobcallow way—a place where the smallest fashion faux pas became a full-blown scandal before the sun hit noon. As I left his office, I knew that my pirate shirt days were over, along with my delusions of dressing like the love child of Captain Morgan and Don Juan.

    With a sigh, I trudged home to swap my dreams of high fashion for something a bit more… professorial.

    I was grateful I wasn’t fired. I drove back to my apartment and resolved to calibrate myself to the customs of this small desert town. Fresh off the bus from the bustling Bay Area, I found that being marooned in this sun-bleached corner of California had affected my judgment. Without any real friends and even fewer social obligations, I lived in more solitude than was good for my mental health. My one-bedroom apartment became my sanctuary—no roommates, no forced small talk, just me and the sweet luxury of never having to negotiate over chores or TV channels. My companions? A stack of CDs featuring Morrissey, The Smiths, Prefab Sprout, Dead Can Dance, The Cocteau Twins, and other bands that sounded like a group therapy session for depressives. The soundtrack was perfect for a guy laboring over Hercu-Dome, my dystopian novel in which society punishes the overweight with Orwellian fervor for failing to meet state-mandated body standards.

    When I wasn’t writing, I’d plink away on my Yamaha ebony upright, conjuring up self-indulgent sonatas that only the most pretentious of muses could appreciate. I didn’t read music so much as I let it ooze out of me—luscious chords here, shameless glissandos there—while imagining some ethereal goddess materializing in my living room to stroke my ego as I struck a soulful pose.

    Next to my piano sat a small side table stacked with International Male and Urban Gear catalogs, glossy monuments to the theology of misguided masculinity. Their pages overflowed with men wearing mesh tank tops, leather pants, silk pirate shirts, and enough gold accessories to alarm a minor dictator. The models did not look like ordinary humans. They looked like nightclub mercenaries preparing to either seduce someone’s wife or overthrow a Caribbean government.

    To my twenty-seven-year-old mind, those catalogs were not merely selling clothes. They were sacred manuscripts revealing the hidden essence of manhood itself. Every page seemed to whisper the same intoxicating lie: You are only one aggressively unbuttoned shirt away from becoming irresistible.

    So I obeyed the catalogs with religious devotion.

    Month by month my wardrobe drifted further into the outer reaches of fashion psychosis until I eventually found myself teaching composition in semi-transparent pirate shirts that shimmered under fluorescent classroom lighting like the wardrobe of a disco-era vampire. At some point, my clothing ceased being “eccentric” and became an administrative concern. My boss had finally noticed that one of his English instructors appeared to be dressing for a yacht-rock cabaret.

    The message was clear: either the catalogs disappeared or my career might.

    And I needed that career desperately. Returning to the Bay Area was unthinkable. The cost of living there, combined with the savagery of the academic job market, had reduced me during graduate school to the economic status of a lost sailor surviving behind a seafood restaurant.

    Compared to the grim survivalism of my Bay Area college years, my Hobcallow apartment felt less like faculty housing and more like a reward package for a minor petrochemical monarch. The place had vaulted ceilings, sliding-glass shower doors, two swimming pools shimmering beneath the desert sun, a bubbling hot tub, and a laundry room so spotless and functional it felt imported from a Scandinavian utopia. Every afternoon the complex glowed with the tranquil confidence of a place where people drank white wine by the pool and casually discussed mutual funds.

    I would stand there in disbelief wondering whether I was a low-ranking composition instructor teaching comma splices to freshmen or an oil tycoon hiding from federal investigators.

    So settled in this desert hideaway, I now enjoyed a hint of the luxury I’d always been denied. On weekends, I tanned my lean, 195-pound frame by The Springs’ apartment pool. No real friendships blossomed at that pool—friendships are messy and overrated—but I did collect some acquaintances, a bizarre cast of lost souls who could only exist in this sun-scorched limbo.

    Chief among my apartment acquaintances was Leonard Skeazy, an attorney from Santa Monica who was lured out here by a fat signing bonus and a monogrammed office, yet couldn’t shake the resentment of having been exiled to this cultural wasteland. He was the sort of guy who treated “style” like a religion. He sported custom-made Speedos that were purchased at a specialty boutique in Santa Monica—yes, he would actually drive back to the city to replace them whenever the chlorinated pool water faded the jewel tones of his spandex. His long, curly hair and eerie blue eyes made him look like a lounge singer who never quite made it out of the Holiday Inn circuit.

    Leonard was a man of eccentric habits and questionable hygiene. Despite being well into his 30s, he clung to the bachelor dream of finding “the right girl,” although his standards seemed laughably out of place in a town where having a high school diploma was considered highbrow. This was a guy who’d lounge poolside for hours, skin glistening like a buttered croissant, all while blasting Kenny G from his boombox as if smooth jazz were somehow his secret weapon. His breath, tinged with the distinct aroma of last night’s Chardonnay, matched his penchant for sneaking sips from boxes of white wine he kept stashed in his fridge.

    Curiosity (and a lack of better options) led me to visit Leonard at his apartment one day. It was a bachelor pad in the most tragic sense. Despite the fact that he was swimming in cash, his apartment was as bare as a prison cell. The living room housed only a lone couch, a TV balanced on cinder blocks, and—wait for it—an ironing board. Apparently, ironing his endless supply of gaudy silk ties was the only domestic task he took seriously. The walls were completely devoid of art or decor, just barren expanses of beige that made the flickering TV light cast ghostly shadows over the snake-like drape of his ties.

    His bedroom was even more pitiful: no dresser, no closet system—just three open suitcases serving as makeshift storage. It was as if he refused to fully unpack, a subconscious protest against ever settling into this armpit of a town. The fridge, naturally, was a barren tundra except for—what else—more boxes of white wine. Here was a man who had chased the scent of money into the middle of nowhere, only to refuse to acknowledge he’d actually arrived. Leonard was a ghost of himself, haunting his own life, clinging to the notion that he was just “visiting” until he could escape back to the big city. 

    What kind of man, I wondered, gets seduced by a fat paycheck only to spend his days living in a self-imposed purgatory, where the only things thriving are his excuses and his growing collection of faded Speedos? I suppose it was easier for Leonard to pretend he was just passing through than to face the fact that he’d become a permanent fixture in this desolate corner of nowhere, a relic clinging to the fading glamour of a life he never truly had.

    My second poolside companion was Roland Beavers. He was the type of poolside companion that nightmares are made of. Imagine, if you will, a pudgy man in his early thirties with dishwasher-blond hair clinging lifelessly to a scalp that seemed perpetually annoyed at its presence. His physique was more doughy than daring, his chin seemingly having taken an early retirement. And yet, this fine specimen insisted on strutting around the pool in a pair of lava-red terry cloth trunks so undersized that they clung to his hips for dear life, revealing a set of stretchmarks that looked like they’d been painted on by a vengeful graffiti artist. Roland, of course, had an explanation ready for anyone who dared make eye contact long enough to hear it. Those stretch marks? Oh, they weren’t the result of his love affair with powdered donuts. They were the battle scars from his days as a world-class daredevil, hurling himself off the cliffs of Acapulco. You could practically hear the collective eye-roll from the pool regulars every time he regaled them with his tales of high-flying heroics. 

    But Roland’s true calling wasn’t acrobatics; it was unsolicited public broadcasting. Armed with a crumpled newspaper, he’d park himself by the pool and provide live commentary on every “news bit” that caught his eye, apparently under the delusion that everyone within a 20-foot radius was breathlessly awaiting his next headline. His audience, meanwhile, mumbled curses under their breath, desperately wishing he’d take up a hobby that didn’t involve public speaking. Maybe knitting—somewhere indoors. Roland’s social cluelessness reached its peak when playful couples would toss a football or frisbee in the water. For Roland, this wasn’t a game he could just watch; it was an invitation. He’d leap into the pool with all the grace of a boulder, wading into their game like an uninvited ghost at a family reunion. The couples, now robbed of their carefree fun, would give him the kind of look reserved for people who talk during movies before stomping off in search of a Roland-free zone. 

    And heaven help the women trying to sunbathe in peace. Roland, ever the gentleman, took it upon himself to offer his “services” to any woman within spraying distance. Whether it was spritzing their backs with a pump bottle of water or offering to rub sunscreen on their shoulders, Roland never missed an opportunity to “help,” oblivious to the fact that his mere presence was enough to ruin their entire tanning experience.

    Of course, these endless days at the pool weren’t just for Roland’s entertainment; they were an extension of his bizarre domestic life. His mother, Nadine, a woman who looked like she could bench-press a Buick, frequently leaned over the balcony of their apartment—muu-muu billowing in the desert wind—barking orders at Roland to “slather on more sunscreen.” With her hair twisted into tight curls that looked like they might pop loose at any moment and neck veins throbbing like they were signaling an SOS, Nadine’s concern for her son was a constant, vocal presence. “Get inside and eat something, Roland! You’re wasting away!” she’d holler, seemingly unaware that Roland had about 40 extra pounds he could “waste away” without anyone noticing.

    You’d think with all this doting and nagging, Roland might be motivated to get a job, maybe contribute something to society—anything to give the rest of us a break. But alas, Roland and Nadine were comfortably cushioned by the settlement from a lawsuit stemming from Roland’s failed attempt at flight school in San Diego. Apparently, the other students in the dorm took one look at Roland’s face and decided it needed to be rearranged, leaving him with a fractured skull and a big fat check to sit around and bother the rest of us for the rest of his natural life.

    And so there he was—our unwanted poolside companion—who, thanks to his mother’s coddling and that lawsuit cash, was free to spend his days lounging in his ridiculous red trunks, delivering headlines no one asked for, and making our lives just a little more unbearable, one stretch mark at a time.

    My third pool acquaintance was Julian French, a man whose very existence seemed to be a tribute act to Paul McCartney. He was one of those poolside characters you couldn’t make up if you tried. In his late thirties, Julian’s resemblance to the legendary Beatle was so uncanny that you’d swear he moonlighted as a Paul McCartney impersonator in some dingy Las Vegas lounge, crooning “Hey Jude” to half-asleep tourists. He had it all: the same nose, mouth, chin, and those forlorn, droopy eyes that looked like they’d seen every heartbreak in the world. He even rocked the signature McCartney hair—a feathered mullet straight out of 1978, perfectly coiffed and well-maintained, despite the sweltering desert heat.

    However, Julian was no rock god. No, he was a tad shorter, pudgier, and carried a complexion that looked like a battlefield of acne scars. Despite his flaws, Julian clung to his resemblance to McCartney like a man hanging off a cliff by his fingernails. His routine was as stale as a week-old scone: he’d slink into clubs in his black “Beatles jacket,” leaning against the bar with a half-grin that screamed, Yes, I know I look like Paul McCartney—please, someone, state the obvious. And sure enough, some tipsy woman would eventually stumble over, eyes wide with wonder, to ask, “Has anyone ever told you…?”

    For Julian, the club scene was nothing more than a factory line. The pick-up process was practically automated. His biggest challenge was pretending that he wasn’t bored out of his skull by the whole charade. He had to feign surprise when the 397th woman in the last year commented on his uncanny resemblance, as if she were the first brilliant soul to make this connection. In truth, Julian’s brain had checked out a long time ago, letting his face and “brand” do all the heavy lifting.

    As I got to know him better at the pool, Julian dropped a bombshell that was as ridiculous as it was tragic. His real name was Michael Barley. “Julian French” was the result of a rebranding, like he was a faded lounge act looking to stage a comeback. And, of course, this wasn’t enough for our wannabe rock star. With his newly minted name and delusional dreams of fame, he’d taken off for London, where he could really “sell” his phony British accent and Paul McCartney shtick. Unfortunately, London wasn’t buying what he was selling, and after job rejections galore, he skulked back to Hobcallow, tail between his legs.

    He couldn’t move back with his parents. They lived in a trailer home connected to an elementary school, where his father was the janitor by day and a roving locksmith by night. Understandably ashamed, Julian decided he needed to put some distance between himself and his parents’ modest living conditions. 

    But what really terrified him wasn’t the trailer—it was the slow, creeping realization that time was catching up with him. As his face got puffier and rounder, the once-proud resemblance to Paul McCartney was fading fast. Panic-stricken, Julian moved out, took a job at a local car dealership, and tried desperately to cling to the last remnants of his “Beatles glory.”

    When I met him, “Julian French” was an aging caricature, still clinging to his faux-British accent, still hoping that someone, anyone, would recognize the rock star lurking beneath his diminishing resemblance. But deep down, he knew the truth: every year, he looked less and less like McCartney and more like a guy who spends his days bumming around a used car lot and his nights reminiscing about the days when he could walk into a club and have women flock to him. Time, like the receding hairline of a rock legend, is a cruel thief.

    With my three poolside companions, my downgraded wardrobe of intentionally boring clothing, and the illusion of stable employment, I gradually settled into a manageable rhythm at that tiny desert outpost. Hobcallow had begun to feel survivable. I imagined myself lingering there indefinitely, teaching freshman composition beneath the brown haze of desert sunsets while slowly calcifying into one more eccentric faculty fossil.

    Then came the bathroom incident.

    I was seated upon the porcelain throne in the sacred solitude of the faculty restroom, pants resting around my ankles in the universal posture of human vulnerability. In my hands sat a copy of Escape from Freedom, whose pages I was reading with the serene concentration of a monk seeking enlightenment through bowel regularity. For one glorious moment, I believed myself alone.

    Then the atmosphere shifted.

    First came the smell: an aggressive cloud of talcum powder battling unsuccessfully against decades of cigarette smoke. Then came the sound—that unmistakable emphysemic wheeze like an accordion being crushed beneath a pickup truck. Even before I saw her, I knew.

    Scary Mary.

    Mary was one of Hobcallow’s permanent academic phantoms, a forty-year-old perpetual student who had wandered the campus for over a decade accumulating grievances, dropped classes, and nicotine residue. She moved through the college like a bureaucratic poltergeist, dragging behind her a neon-pink luggage cart overloaded with tote bags, paperwork, and unresolved hostility toward authority.

    “Mary,” I said from inside the stall, already exhausted by her existence, “I know it’s you. You need to leave immediately.”

    “Professor McMahon,” came her gravelly chain-smoker rasp, “I need to talk to you about my grade.”

    There are few sentences in the English language less welcome than those words spoken through the door of a men’s restroom stall.

    “Mary,” I replied, “this is the men’s room. I could have campus police arrest you. Leave now.”

    But Mary possessed the survival instincts of a cockroach crawling through radioactive fallout. “Not until you explain why I got a C.”

    As though we were calmly discussing educational philosophy over herbal tea rather than conducting a hostage negotiation through a bathroom partition.

    “We can discuss your grade in my office.”

    But reason had no jurisdiction over Scary Mary.

    A moment later, her long nicotine-yellowed fingers appeared over the top of the stall divider, clutching the partition like a low-budget horror villain scaling castle walls. I stared upward in disbelief as she climbed atop her ridiculous tower of pink luggage until her skeletal, sweating face slowly emerged above the divider like an exhausted demon materializing from a nicotine-scented dimension.

    “You need to help me, Professor,” she wheezed between labored breaths. “I can’t fail this class again.”

    At that point I rose, fully dressed now, vibrating with the fury of a man whose sacred bathroom ritual had been catastrophically violated.

    “You want to know why you got a C, Mary?” I snapped. “Fine. Your incoherent fifth-grade chicken scratch is so catastrophically unreadable it makes me question the entire mission of higher education.”

    Mary recoiled as though slapped. Her cavernous eyes locked onto mine with reptilian stillness.

    “You’re a terrible person,” she hissed. “This isn’t over.”

    Then physics intervened.

    Attempting to descend from her unstable luggage-cart fortress, Mary lost her footing and toppled forward in spectacular slow motion, collapsing onto the restroom floor like a sack of broomsticks hurled from a second-story window. She immediately began writhing and shrieking about a dislocated shoulder. Whether she was genuinely injured or merely auditioning for another campus grievance remained unclear.

    I exited the stall, washed my hands with the eerie calmness of a man nearing psychological collapse, and stared down at the wreckage sprawled across the tile floor.

    “Aren’t you going to help me?” she whimpered.

    Something strange overtook me then. Perhaps it was pity. Perhaps heatstroke. Perhaps prolonged exposure to Hobcallow had finally dissolved the last functioning portions of my judgment.

    “I can do better than help you up,” I announced. “I can fix your shoulder.”

    Her eyes widened with desperate hope.

    “You can?”

    “Absolutely. My brother dislocated his shoulder during a soccer championship. I watched the coach pop it back in.”

    This was technically true in the same way watching a documentary qualifies someone to perform open-heart surgery.

    I grabbed her wrist with both hands and yanked with the reckless confidence of a man operating entirely outside the boundaries of professional liability. Mary screamed loud enough to alarm neighboring departments.

    Then suddenly she blinked in astonishment.

    “Oh my God,” she gasped. “You fixed it.”

    “I know,” I replied, with the casual arrogance of a frontier doctor amputating limbs beside a whiskey barrel.

    Mary slowly rose to her feet, rubbing her shoulder with renewed determination.

    “Mr. McMahon?”

    “Yes, Mary?”

    “I have to pass your class whether you like it or not.”

    I stared at her, too exhausted to fully process the sentence.

    “Yes,” I sighed. “That does remain a theoretical possibility.”

    Relieved that I had somehow escaped arrest, litigation, or exorcism, I headed toward class assuming the nightmare had finally ended.

    The next morning, however, I was summoned to Moses’s office for what the message described as “an urgent matter,” a phrase that in academic life usually means someone has either filed a complaint, discovered a budget shortfall, or decided that your continued employment is an unnecessary luxury.

    Moses was slumped in his leather chair, wearing the grave expression of a man preparing to deliver bad news while also protecting himself from liability.

    “Have you heard?” he asked.

    I shook my head.

    “I received a call from Charlene Johnson, editor of The Hobcallow Chronicle. Her boyfriend is Mary’s brother. He’s not happy.”

    “Mary barged into the men’s room,” I said.

    Moses raised both hands, palms out, as if calming a hostage negotiator. “I’m sure she did. And believe me, you are not the first instructor she has pursued into inappropriate architectural spaces.”

    He paused, letting the institutional fog thicken.

    “But you didn’t handle it in the most ideal way.”

    “She climbed over a bathroom stall.”

    “Yes,” Moses said, with the weary diplomacy of a man who had long ago surrendered to absurdity. “And that was unfortunate. But her brother is a captain in the Hobcallow Police Department, and according to Charlene, he feels your remarks were unusually insulting. Unprecedented, even. Cruel.”

    “She invaded my personal space while I was half-naked and reading Erich Fromm.”

    Moses extended one arm to silence me, the way a priest might halt a drunk parishioner before a wedding toast. “Cruelty has no place in this department.”

    I stared at him. This was academia at its purest: a woman could scale a restroom stall like a nicotine-stained gargoyle, but my tone had apparently violated community standards.

    “If that weren’t enough,” Moses continued, “this morning I received a memo about budget cuts.”

    He stopped and gazed at a framed photograph from the previous year’s department picnic, where several instructors stood around a folding table of potato salad, unaware they were being documented for future elegies.

    “Lecturer positions,” he said, “will be the first to go.”

    “So I’m out,” I said. “Because Scary Mary launched a bathroom assault and I failed to respond with sufficient pastoral tenderness.”

    “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. We may have a solution.”

    He picked up a copy of The Hobcallow Chronicle, cleared his throat, and leaned back in his chair with the solemn theatricality of a frontier judge about to sentence a horse thief.

    “One of my primary responsibilities,” he said, “is keeping lecturers employed in good times and bad. In bad times, we must become innovative. We must demonstrate our value to the community.”

    I nodded, performing the expression of a man who understood the moral urgency of public relations.

    “I’ve been working with Charlene,” Moses said, “to generate positive visibility for the university.”

    “You mean Charlene, the newspaper editor who is dating Mary’s brother, the police captain.”

    “Yes,” he said, as if this were merely an interesting footnote and not a cartel of small-town leverage forming around my throat.

    “Charlene and I have developed a way for you to preserve your job. In addition to your teaching duties, you will intervene with local citizens and help them find their true path.”

    “Their true path?”

    “Yes. And I already have someone in mind.”

    I felt the room tilt.

    “The good news,” Moses said, “is that you know him.”

    “Please don’t say Roland Beavers.”

    “Roland Beavers.”

    My stomach dropped through the floor and continued downward toward the earth’s molten core. Roland Beavers was a local cautionary tale wrapped in too-small swim trunks, a man-child whose existence seemed designed to test the outer limits of civic compassion.

    Moses brightened, mistaking my horror for engagement.

    “Roland has certain learning deficits that have prevented him from advancing here at the university. You, my friend, are going to help him.”

    “Does Roland even know how to read?”

    “I would assume nothing,” Moses said, his patience thinning. “But you will teach him grammar, sentence structure, paragraph development—the works. Think of it as mechanical repair. You open the hood, remove the corroded parts, and install something functional.”

    “I’m not known for remediation.”

    “No one is known for remediation,” Moses snapped. “Remediation is tedious, dirty work. It’s like scrubbing mildew off a shower curtain. But someone has to do it, and since you already know Roland, you are the ideal candidate.”

    “Oh, I know him.”

    Moses leaned forward, his eyes narrowing with administrative intensity.

    “You tutor this poor fellow—the sad sack who washed out of aviation school—and turn him into something passable. Then Charlene can run a human-interest feature: ‘Local Professor Helps Troubled Man Rise Above.’ You become not merely a lecturer but an asset. A community figure. An educator with a heart.”

    “A heart that apparently must beat inside a hostage situation.”

    “It might save your job.”

    The room went quiet.

    “Can I at least think it over?” I asked.

    “You have until lunch,” Moses said. “After that, I have a budget meeting where we decide which lecturers get renewed and which ones get released into the desert. Rumor is the cuts may be brutal.”

    And just like that, the full weight of Hobcallow’s budget crisis landed on my shoulders, where it sat beside an even stranger burden: my professional survival now depended on whether I could teach Roland Beavers to assemble a coherent sentence without injuring either of us.

    After being strong-armed by Moses into an unwanted mentorship arrangement that sounded less like education and more like court-ordered rehabilitation, I stormed home fueled by equal parts resentment, panic, and wounded pride. My academic career now appeared to hinge on whether I could somehow transform Roland Beavers—a human caution sign in swim trunks—into a functioning college student.

    I collapsed into my apartment trying to process the catastrophe while contemplating dinner, which at that moment consisted of opening yet another can of tuna and chewing on a raw green pepper with the grim enthusiasm of a prisoner preserving muscle mass in solitary confinement. The whole meal radiated culinary despair. It was not food so much as nutritional surrender.

    Then came the knock at the door.

    I opened it to find Nadine Beavers herself standing in the hallway like a floral-print apparition from the Church of Aggressive Hospitality. She wore her trademark muu-muu exploding with tropical flowers so loud and oversized it looked less like clothing and more like upholstery liberated from a Hawaiian casino lounge. In her arms she carried two steaming casserole dishes with the solemnity of a woman delivering diplomatic aid to a war-torn nation.

    “I heard my son might have the privilege of having you as his personal mentor and tutor,” she said with a sheepish grin.

    Then she gave a strange little snort, as though we were about to enter a backroom gambling arrangement involving counterfeit casino chips and emotional dependency.

    “Figured it’d be nice to get to know what we’re getting into.”

    Before I could respond, she swept past me and deposited the dishes onto my kitchen table with a heavy thud that shook the silverware drawer. One contained a taco casserole radiating molten cheese, cumin, and enough grease to lubricate industrial machinery. The other was a strawberry pie glistening beneath fluorescent lights like a sacred object worshipped by Midwestern church communities.

    The smell alone nearly brought me to tears. Moments earlier I had been preparing to gnaw through dry tuna and uncooked peppers like a survivalist trapped in a nuclear bunker. Now my apartment smelled like human warmth, butter, melted cheese, and the kind of reckless carbohydrate optimism capable of derailing entire diet plans.

    Nadine looked around my apartment with the relaxed confidence of a woman who had already decided she belonged there.

    “Well,” she said, placing both hands on her hips, “if you’re gonna save Roland’s future, you sure as hell aren’t doing it on canned fish.”

    I stood there, transfixed, as she lifted the lid off the taco casserole. The scent alone hit me like a punch—layers of melted cheese, crisped to perfection, with seasoned meat, beans, and salsa bubbling underneath. My stomach growled so loudly it could’ve been mistaken for a Harley-Davidson revving up. Each bubble of cheese seemed to mock my restraint, daring me to dive in. As she unveiled the casserole, I could almost hear the crunch of tortilla chips mingling with that gooey, cheesy goodness. This wasn’t just dinner—it was an emotional rollercoaster masquerading as comfort food.

    But Nadine wasn’t done yet. With the precision of someone handling a priceless artifact, she slowly peeled back the foil from the strawberry pie. The crinkling foil built up anticipation like a suspenseful thriller. Underneath was a glossy, vibrant pie that looked more like a work of art than a dessert. The strawberries were arranged like they’d been hand-placed by a food stylist—gleaming, ruby-red slices sitting in a pool of sweet glaze, nestled within a buttery, golden crust. The smell was an olfactory hug, a heady mix of fresh fruit and pastry that all but made my knees buckle. I could practically taste the sweet-tangy perfection before even lifting a fork. Nadine caught me eyeing the pie with the kind of longing usually reserved for forbidden love and nudged me with a knowing smirk. “Don’t be afraid of it—dig in.”

    With a fork now in hand and no semblance of dignity left, I heaped a mountain of casserole onto my plate and pretended to listen to Nadine recount her son’s tragic life story. I’d already heard every miserable detail directly from Roland himself, who repeated the narrative so often it was like he was auditioning for a reality show nobody wanted to watch. But I knew the price of good food—feigned interest and patience. So I nodded along, punctuating her monologue with sympathetic “hmm”s and “ah”s while internally counting down to dessert.

    That’s when she dropped the real bombshell: Roland was currently sprawled out on their couch nursing a black eye, the result of getting “fresh” with some guy’s girlfriend at the pool. According to Nadine, Roland’s brilliant strategy involved spraying her with water and then trying to join in on a playful water fight—clearly a move that went over about as well as a lead balloon. The girlfriend’s boyfriend solved the problem with his fist, and now Roland was sidelined with a bag of ice and bruised ego.

    “He has no common sense,” Nadine lamented. “I don’t know what to do with him. The psychologist at the university said he needs a mentor, and your boss thinks that could be you.”

    I choked a little on my casserole. “To be truthful, I’ve never mentored anyone before.”

    Nadine’s expression turned serious. “But you’re a teacher—an educator. And you live right here. Do you know how convenient that is? My boy doesn’t like to venture far from home.”

    I tried to explain that this was more of a job for a trained psychologist, but she waved me off like I was suggesting something as outlandish as skydiving lessons. “Forget that. You mentor him, and you’ll be doing some fine eating around here. Am I clear?”

    At that point, I took a bite of the strawberry pie, and whatever resolve I’d clung to dissolved faster than the buttery, flaky crust. The explosion of sweet, tart berries wrapped in velvety smoothness was nothing short of divine intervention. “It’s outstanding,” I said, my voice laced with an awe that was embarrassing for a grown man. “Honestly, it’s the best meal I’ve had in longer than I care to admit.”

    Nadine leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms with the satisfaction of a mafia boss whose offer you can’t refuse. “There’s a reason I’ve been the chair of the Crust and Crumble Club for the last twenty years. People respect excellence in a leader, and pie-making is no different.” She allowed herself a self-satisfied smirk, the kind that made it clear she knew she had me wrapped around her flour-dusted finger.

    “There’s more where that came from if you agree to help my boy,” she continued, her voice silky with unspoken promises. “You’ll love mentoring Roland. The two of you will become great friends. And you could do a lot worse than enjoying homemade taco casserole, extra-cheesy, and an endless stream of pies in your corner. Stability, comfort, and good eats—what else do you need in this God-forsaken desert?”

    I surveyed the spread before me—a smorgasbord of all-American excess, the kind of food that made you forget your troubles until the heartburn kicked in. There was no denying it—I had been bought out by casseroles and confectionery. 

    Seduced by comforting casseroles and fruit pies and terrified of unemployment, I began my tutorials with Roland Beavers. Roland would roll up to my apartment like some kind of culinary Santa Claus, lugging casseroles, chili, cornbread, or a spaghetti feast—all meant to bribe me into pretending we were engaging in serious academic work. These sessions were a farce, a charade we both went along with because, honestly, who says no to free food?

    Moses, in his infinite wisdom (read: desperation), had armed me with a stack of sixth-grade workbooks to use with Roland, presumably to inch him toward literacy. But Roland’s visits were less about learning and more about napping on my couch. He’d complain of headaches after writing half of a paragraph and declare himself “famished” just as he was about to grasp the complexities of a compound sentence. The guy had a black belt in avoidance. Before I knew it, he’d polished off the very dinner his mother had cooked for me, slumped into a food coma, and settled in to watch the Angels game from first pitch to final out. Or he’d watch with fascination the diet guru Suan Powter with her buzzcut shout the merits of lentils on her infomercial where her call to “stop the insanity” seemed to be encouraging her own maniacal demon to flourish. The set was a minimalist nightmare: harsh lighting, white walls, and an audience of desperate souls hanging on her every word. And then there were the graphics—big, bold letters flashing “CUT THE FAT!” and “EAT RIGHT NOW!”—just in case her voice alone wasn’t enough to drill the message into your brain. Every so often, she’d grab a cardboard cutout of the food pyramid and tear it apart like she was dismantling a corrupt regime. By then, I was grading essays and wondering how I’d ended up in this ridiculous parody of a mentorship program.

    It didn’t take long to see that trying to whip Roland into academic shape was like trying to sculpt marble out of a melting ice cream cone. The guy simply didn’t have the drive—or, frankly, the capacity—for discipline. I wasn’t about to carry him up the mountain of success while he sat back and asked for snack breaks. My philosophy was simple: everyone climbs their own mountains. If Roland wanted to remain at base camp eating cornbread, that was his prerogative. My job was to reach the summit of my own ambitions, not drag dead weight up a hill.

    For reasons I never fully understood, Roland regarded my apartment less as a place of study and more as a federally protected sleep sanctuary. He’d lumber through the front door, collapse onto my couch with the tragic relief of a Civil War soldier returning from battle, and within thirty seconds begin snoring with the industrial fury of malfunctioning logging equipment.

    Fortunately, this arrangement worked beautifully for me.

    Officially, I was tutoring Roland Beavers. In reality, I was grading freshman essays while a California Angels game murmured in the background and Roland—Hobcallow’s reigning emperor of arrested development—vibrated my couch cushions with nasal acoustics powerful enough to register on seismographs in neighboring counties.

    The whole situation evolved into a kind of desert academic farce. Roland got a climate-controlled nap chamber safely removed from the watchful eye of his mother, Nadine. I received home-cooked meals from Nadine so enormous and buttery they could’ve qualified as agricultural subsidies. And Moses, architect of Hobcallow’s endless bureaucratic theater, got the appearance of community outreach and educational uplift.

    Nobody seemed particularly concerned that the actual tutoring had died months earlier. The remedial workbooks sat untouched on the coffee table like archaeological artifacts from a failed civilization. In Hobcallow, “tutoring” was less about literacy than optics. As long as someone could point toward two men occupying the same room with a pencil nearby, the program was considered a triumph of social progress.

    During one of our so-called tutorial sessions—which by that point consisted primarily of me grading freshman essays while Roland Beavers used my couch as a federally protected sleep sanctuary—I heard Leonard Skeazy downstairs engaged in yet another operatic confrontation with one of his ex-girlfriends. Leonard had cycled through so many public breakups that the apartment complex treated them like recurring holiday events, but this one possessed a darker voltage.

    The shouting escalated rapidly.

    I set down a stack of essays and walked to the window just in time to witness the spectacle unfolding beside the pool. Leonard and his ex stood nose-to-nose beneath the blistering Hobcallow sun, gesturing wildly like two failed Shakespearean actors performing divorce proceedings in a chlorine-scented amphitheater.

    Then she shoved him.

    Not hard enough to qualify as attempted murder, but with enough force to send Leonard stumbling sideways into the community newspaper rack. His body twisted awkwardly on impact, and he collapsed onto the pavement with a heavy, meaty thud that echoed across the courtyard. He immediately clutched his knee and began howling with such theatrical agony that it sounded less like physical pain and more like a wounded banshee auditioning for daytime television.

    The scream jolted Roland awake.

    He sprang from the couch in a panic, hair disheveled, eyes half-open, moving with the startled confusion of a tranquilized zoo animal suddenly hearing gunfire. By the time I reached the window again, Roland was already barreling down the stairs toward the growing crowd.

    Nadine Beavers had somehow arrived even faster.

    She stood over Leonard in her ever-present floral apron, which fluttered in the desert wind like the battle flag of aggressive maternal intervention. Her expression carried that uniquely Nadine combination of genuine compassion and total exasperation.

    “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Leonard!” she barked. “You’re making a spectacle of yourself.”

    Yet beneath the irritation there was unmistakable concern. Nadine treated wounded narcissists the way battlefield nurses treat delirious soldiers: harshly, efficiently, and with just enough tenderness to keep them alive.

    Roland crouched beside Leonard and helped prop him upright while Nadine examined the swollen knee with surprising gentleness.

    “Serves you right for acting like a fool,” she muttered, though her hands moved carefully across the injury.

    Leonard blinked back tears, gasping dramatically like a fish dragged onto a dock.

    “They’re all against me,” he wheezed. “I’m the victim of character assassination.”

    “Character assassination, my foot,” Nadine snapped. “You’re the victim of your own stupidity. Now stop whining so we can get you standing before the whole complex starts charging admission.”

    By then a small crowd had gathered around the pool, drawn not by concern but by the ancient human instinct to witness public humiliation. Apartment complexes like ours functioned as low-budget Roman coliseums where everyone secretly hoped for spectacle as long as they themselves were not the ones bleeding beside the vending machines.

    With considerable effort—and enough groaning from Leonard to suggest emergency battlefield surgery—they managed to hoist him upright. Roland handled most of the lifting while Nadine hovered nearby like an overbearing but strangely competent vulture overseeing roadside trauma care.

    The crowd slowly dispersed, disappointed the entertainment had concluded without handcuffs, nudity, or visible bloodshed.

    And so Leonard Skeazy limped away between Roland and Nadine like a fallen dictator being evacuated after a failed coup. Behind him floated scattered laughter, muttered insults, and the faint echo of ridicule from the poolside audience. It was the perfect Hobcallow ending: in his endless quest to defend his reputation, Leonard had once again managed only to deepen the legend of his own ridiculousness.

    Watching the three of them disappear toward the Beavers’ apartment, I realized the entire scene possessed the surreal emotional texture of small-town desert mythology. Roland and Nadine, those unlikely knights in polyester armor, had waddled into action to rescue Hobcallow’s most shameless self-saboteur and carry him off for “first aid,” as though this were not merely another chapter in Leonard Skeazy’s endless cycle of vanity, collapse, and public humiliation.

    A few days after Leonard’s poolside collapse, I was standing at my apartment window one afternoon drinking burnt coffee while Roland Beavers snored on my couch with the unwavering commitment of a professional hibernating mammal. That was when I witnessed one of the strangest sights Hobcallow had yet produced—and this was a town with an alarmingly high tolerance for absurdity.

    Parked beneath one of the apartment carports sat an ancient Chevy truck overflowing with wooden crates of apricots, peaches, and nectarines. Emerging from the vehicle were Leonard Skeazy and Julian French.

    At first I didn’t recognize them.

    Both men were dressed in dirt-stained blue work jumpsuits, the kind worn by sanitation crews, orchard laborers, and minimum-security prison workers assigned roadside cleanup duty. Their expensive sunglasses and poolside vanity had vanished. Their faces were sun-darkened and strangely peaceful. Leonard no longer looked like a failed attorney clinging desperately to status. Julian no longer resembled a bankrupt salesman auditioning for yacht-club membership. Together they looked like two men who had wandered off a fruit collective somewhere outside Bakersfield.

    “Roland,” I said, staring through the blinds, “you need to wake up and explain to me why Leonard and Julian are dressed like migrant mechanics hauling peaches into your mother’s apartment.”

    Roland opened one eye with the tragic exhaustion of a man being interrupted during a medically necessary nap.

    “Oh,” he mumbled. “They work for my mom now.”

    I turned slowly toward him.

    “What happened to Leonard’s law career?”

    “He got fired,” Roland said calmly. “Work-code violations. Sexual harassment, I think.”

    “And Julian?”

    “Hadn’t made a commission in almost a year.”

    Roland closed his eyes again, clearly hoping this concluded the conversation so he could return to unconsciousness.

    “No, no, no,” I said. “You don’t get to fall back asleep after dropping information like that. What exactly do they do for your mother?”

    Roland shrugged.

    “Whatever she tells them to do. They’re basically her assistants.”

    Outside the window, Leonard and Julian continued unloading crates of fruit with serene concentration while Nadine directed operations from the apartment doorway like a floral-print field marshal overseeing wartime agricultural logistics.

    “How does she pay them?”

    “She has a budget,” Roland replied.

    “A budget for what?”

    “The Crust and Crumble Club.”

    He said this with such confidence that I nodded reflexively, pretending it made perfect sense when in reality my brain had begun short-circuiting. Somehow my two poolside acquaintances—once obsessed with image, status, and masculine prestige—had been absorbed into Nadine Beavers’s domestic empire and transformed into fruit-hauling assistants dressed like auto-body repairmen.

    Before I could process the full horror of the situation, the phone rang.

    It was Moses.

    And for once, the news was good.

    Apparently The Hobcallow Chronicle had run a glowing human-interest profile about my mentorship of Roland Beavers, portraying me as a compassionate educational savior guiding a local misfit toward literacy and redemption. The article had generated such favorable publicity—and coincided with a miraculous budgetary windfall—that Moses had successfully secured my tenure.

    There would, he informed me, be a celebration in my honor at the campus ale house.

    The following Friday, the Crust & Crumble Club transformed the ale house into a strange hybrid of retirement banquet, church social, and tropical nervous breakdown. Crepe-paper streamers sagged from the ceiling. Dollar-store balloons floated weakly above folding tables. Somewhere in the corner, a battered boombox crooned bossa nova music with the melancholy sophistication of a 1963 cocktail lounge slowly sinking into the sea.

    The dessert tables looked catastrophic in the best possible way. Berry pies, cream pies, cobblers, and pastries stretched across the room in such abundance they resembled offerings to a Midwestern fertility deity. Each pie sat there with glossy perfection, as though auditioning for the cover of Better Homes & Gardens.

    Naturally, Roland arrived in khaki shorts and a Hawaiian shirt already smeared with pie filling. By the time I entered the room, he was elbow-deep in boysenberry pie, grinning blissfully with purple crumbs glued to his face like evidence from a carbohydrate crime scene.

    Nadine spotted me immediately.

    “There he is!” she cried, waving me toward a throne-like chair draped in a crocheted blanket that looked one upholstery stain away from hospice care.

    “Special seat for the man of the hour!”

    Before I could protest, she shoved a paper plate into my hands carrying a mountain of boysenberry pie drowning beneath an avalanche of whipped cream.

    Standing beside her were Roberta Hunter and Felice Orozco, Nadine’s two closest confidantes and Hobcallow’s reigning queens of floral-print judgment. Together they resembled a triumvirate of dessert-loving desert oracles silently evaluating everyone’s moral worth, pie technique, and cholesterol levels.

    Then I noticed Leonard and Julian.

    The two men were hauling cases of champagne and bags of ice into the ale house with astonishing cheerfulness. Their faces glowed with purpose. They congratulated me warmly, slapping my back like loyal campaign staffers celebrating an election victory. Strangest of all, they appeared genuinely happy.

    Happier, perhaps, than when they were pretending to be successful.

    “So how exactly,” I asked Nadine carefully, “did you manage to rein in Leonard and Julian?”

    Nadine exchanged a knowing grin with Roberta.

    “I have my ways,” she said.

    Then she leaned closer, lowering her voice conspiratorially.

    “There’s a certain kind of man who needs my intervention. It’s simply a matter of finding him and helping him discover his proper place in the world.”

    Something about the sentence chilled me.

    The evening dissolved into the predictable rituals of Hobcallow celebration: speeches, applause, cake, cheap champagne, and finally Moses announcing that my tenure entitled me to a new executive desk engraved with my initials so I could feel, in his words, “permanently rooted within the intellectual future of Hobcallow.”

    As though an engraved desk could cure existential confusion.

    Later that night, after the party ended, I remained alone inside the darkened ale house surrounded by popped balloons, empty pie tins, wilted streamers, and the sticky residue of forced merriment. I was in no hurry to return to my apartment where Roland was almost certainly already asleep on my couch.

    Outside, Leonard and Julian loaded leftover pies and party supplies into the Chevy truck while soft bossa nova music drifted from a boombox sitting in the truck bed. The two men laughed together warmly beneath the desert night air. I overheard one of them mention they still needed to meet Nadine afterward to “help her with something.”

    I sat there listening to them and felt something cold settle inside me.

    What had happened to these men?

    What had happened to me?

    We were the lost men of Hobcallow, and Nadine Beavers had not merely rescued us. In her own strange maternal empire of pies, casseroles, errands, and emotional dependency, she had quietly absorbed us completely.

    I tried to suppress the thought by reminding myself that Monday morning I would arrive at work to find a brand-new executive desk engraved with my initials—as though polished wood and bureaucratic recognition might finally convince me I belonged somewhere.

  • Essay Prompt: The Performance Trap: Online Identity, Narcissism, and the Collapse of the Real Self

    Essay Prompt: The Performance Trap: Online Identity, Narcissism, and the Collapse of the Real Self

    In the Netflix documentary The Crash and the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” audiences witness characters whose lives become consumed by spectacle, performance, surveillance, and the relentless pressure of online visibility. While the two works differ in genre—one a real-life tragedy and the other a satirical dystopian drama—both raise disturbing questions about how modern digital culture reshapes identity, distorts reality, and erodes the boundary between authentic selfhood and online performance.

    In The Crash, the documentary suggests that Mackenzie Shirilla’s compulsive online self-curation reflected a deeper psychological unraveling in which image management, attention-seeking, and social media validation became inseparable from her sense of identity. Meanwhile, in “Joan Is Awful,” Joan discovers that her life has been transformed into a grotesque entertainment product streamed to millions of viewers, forcing her to confront the horrifying possibility that her real self has become secondary to a digitally manufactured persona designed for mass consumption. In both works, online visibility functions less as a tool for communication and more as a vortex that pulls individuals toward narcissism, performative behavior, emotional instability, and estrangement from reality itself.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare The Crash and “Joan Is Awful” to examine the claim that maintaining a constant online presence can suck people into a vortex of unhinged narcissism and madness that makes them unrecognizable from their authentic selves.

    Your essay should analyze how both works depict:

    • the transformation of identity into performance;
    • the addictive pursuit of attention, relevance, and validation;
    • the psychological consequences of constant self-curation and surveillance;
    • the collapse of the boundary between private life and public spectacle;
    • and the dangers of confusing online visibility with genuine human worth.

    You should also address the broader cultural implications of these works. What do these texts suggest about the modern relationship between technology and identity? Do social media platforms merely reveal narcissism already present in human nature, or do they actively manufacture and intensify it? At what point does self-expression become self-erasure?

    A strong essay will move beyond summary and develop a clear argumentative thesis that makes an original claim about the psychological and cultural dangers presented in both works. Your thesis should be supported by detailed analysis of scenes, dialogue, imagery, characterization, and thematic parallels between the documentary and the episode.

    You must include:

    • a clear and debatable thesis;
    • detailed comparison of both works;
    • at least one counterargument and rebuttal;
    • analysis of specific scenes and examples;
    • and thoughtful commentary about the relationship between technology, identity, and modern culture.

    Possible directions for argument include:

    • Social media transforms ordinary narcissism into pathological self-obsession.
    • Constant online performance erodes authentic identity and emotional stability.
    • Digital culture rewards outrage, exhibitionism, and emotional extremity.
    • Online validation creates a dopamine-driven cycle that destabilizes mental health.
    • Surveillance culture turns human beings into entertainment products.
    • The internet encourages people to construct marketable personas rather than genuine selves.

    You may agree, disagree, or complicate the prompt’s central argument, but your essay must directly engage the idea that online self-curation can psychologically deform individuals and distance them from reality.

    Requirements:

    • Approximately 1,000 words
    • MLA format
    • Clear introduction, body paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal section, and conclusion
    • Use evidence from both The Crash and “Joan Is Awful”
    • Include a Works Cited page

    The strongest essays will avoid simplistic “technology bad” arguments and instead explore the more unsettling possibility that modern digital culture rewards the most performative, narcissistic, and emotionally unstable versions of ourselves until the performance eventually consumes the person behind it.

  • Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    It was difficult to watch the Netflix documentary The Crash, which chronicles the horrifying case of two young men killed in a car crash after prosecutors argued that the driver, Mackenzie Shirilla, deliberately floored the gas pedal of her Toyota Camry to nearly one hundred miles per hour in an act deemed premeditated murder. The documentary is disturbing not merely because of the violence of the crash, but because of the portrait it paints of a young woman whose identity had become inseparable from her online performance. Mackenzie appeared trapped inside the exhausting machinery of self-curation, sculpting and broadcasting her existence with the kind of manic persistence social media now rewards as normal behavior. Her digital persona no longer seemed like an accessory to her life. It had metastasized into her life.

    Today, while listening to the podcast Blocked and Reported, I heard Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog discuss Gen Z’s eerie fluency for turning existence itself into a livestream. Both millennials sounded genuinely alienated by the phenomenon, as though they were describing a species only slightly adjacent to their own. Jesse referenced Mackenzie Shirilla’s relentless online presence as depicted in The Crash, pointing to the unsettling ease with which younger generations curate themselves for permanent digital exhibition. Yet one of the influencers discussed on the podcast commands nearly a million followers—a level of attention powerful enough to hijack almost any fragile human nervous system. Social media platforms have effectively industrialized validation, converting attention into a neurochemical slot machine that pays out in intermittent bursts of relevance, envy, and simulated affection.

    Attention itself is not the enemy. Human beings need recognition. Writers, artists, teachers, comedians, philosophers, and musicians all seek an audience because they are attempting to contribute something meaningful to the ongoing argument about what it means to be alive. But attention detached from substance becomes false gold. It glitters, intoxicates, and ultimately leaves the soul spiritually bankrupt. The dopamine cycle masquerades as significance while quietly hollowing out the self.

    The danger comes when a person can no longer distinguish between authentic identity and algorithmic performance. The online persona begins as branding, then evolves into compulsion, and finally hardens into pathology. It becomes louder, crueler, more narcissistic, and more detached from ordinary human proportion. The person starts living not for reality itself, but for its documentation. Meals become props. Relationships become content. Suffering becomes theater. Even grief gets optimized for engagement metrics. At that point, the self is no longer steering the machine; the machine is steering the self.

    Mackenzie Shirilla appears to have crossed that line. She allowed the curated self to consume the actual self. What remained was not individuality but a kind of digital possession—a consciousness warped by attention addiction, performative intensity, and emotional exhibitionism. The tragedy of The Crash is not merely that lives were destroyed in a violent instant. It is that modern culture increasingly trains young people to confuse visibility with meaning, performance with identity, and online relevance with human worth. Mackenzie lost that distinction entirely. In the end, the algorithm did not merely shape her personality. It devoured it.

  • This Is No Country for Old Men in Lycra

    This Is No Country for Old Men in Lycra

    No one warns you that approaching your mid-sixties feels less like aging and more like becoming technologically obsolete while still conscious enough to notice it. One day you are a functioning member of civilization; the next you are standing in a Costco parking lot wondering whether you already bought twelve gallons of trash bags or merely fantasized about buying them. You begin dropping references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and Super Chicken only to receive the same vacant stares one might reserve for a Civil War reenactor muttering battlefield coordinates.

    Meanwhile, your body begins quietly renegotiating its contract with reality.

    As a lifelong bodybuilder whose recovery now resembles a bankrupt public-works project—slow, inefficient, and riddled with delays—I understand how difficult it is to relinquish the fantasy of permanent vitality. Spend a week in Maui and the fantasy returns with tropical force. Hawaii is not merely a vacation destination. It is a pharmaceutical hallucination disguised as geography. You board a four-hundred-million-dollar jet, dry yourself into salted beef jerky for five hours, and land convinced that mortality itself has suffered a clerical error.

    Within twenty-four hours you are marinating in mai tais, vaporizing lilikoi pie with devotional intensity, and sitting beneath sunsets so offensively beautiful they seem personally designed by God to restore your self-esteem. Time dissolves. Deadlines vanish. Your phone feels vulgar. Maui whispers into your ear like a luxury hypnotist: Relax. Death can’t locate you here.

    Which is why leaving the island feels psychologically violent.

    You are not simply returning to California. You are returning to spam emails, lower-back stiffness, Costco receipts, cholesterol panels, and the humiliating realization that gravity remains undefeated. For weeks afterward you wander through suburbia in a tropical narcotic haze while your neighbor’s leaf blower screams through the morning air like dental equipment excavating a wisdom tooth from your skull. Maui is less a place than a controlled substance for affluent aging people desperate to suspend disbelief.

    It is also a theater of curated immortality.

    Old men roam the beaches in tiny Lycra swim briefs with the confidence of Roman emperors who somehow survived into the Ozempic era. Their skin resembles expensive leather luggage abandoned too long in the sun, yet they strut beside trophy wives young enough to think dial-up internet was a Bronze Age inconvenience. Wealth, GLP-1 drugs, testosterone clinics, cosmetic dentistry, peptide injections, and Hawaiian sunlight collaborate to create the illusion that biology has become negotiable.

    I remember one grotesque specimen vividly from the summer of 2019: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading through Maui in dark-blue Speedos beside a Mediterranean twenty-something so beautiful she looked less like a spouse and more like an acquisition. He moved with the frantic confidence of a hedge-fund satyr convinced that constant motion itself could keep death wheezing several yards behind him. He dove into the surf not like a swimmer but like a man bargaining with Time.

    You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air.

    The strange thing was not the age gap. Human vanity has always outsourced dignity whenever money allows it. No, what fascinated me was the unmistakable misalignment of the tableau. The forced smiles. The awkward touches. The overcompensating strut. It did not feel like youth preserved. It felt like youth taxidermied.

    And this, I increasingly realize, is the central agony of aging in modern America: not decline itself, but visible misalignment with the surrounding culture.

    You can fight it. God knows I do. You can swallow vats of omega-3 fish oil, consume two hundred grams of protein a day, swing kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the rough approximation of a man twenty years younger. But eventually biology leaks through the cracks. Your night vision deteriorates. Downtown Los Angeles traffic begins to resemble a psychedelic military simulation. Google Maps betrays you into six-lane intersections populated by homicidal scooters, distracted pedestrians, and pastel-lit Waymo vehicles gliding through the streets like cheerful robot hearses escorting you toward irrelevance.

    That realization hit me hardest while driving my wife and twin daughters to Camp Flog Gnaw, a music festival whose title sounds less like an entertainment event and more like a medieval punishment device. Downtown Los Angeles unfolded before me like a gladiatorial arena engineered specifically to eliminate men my age. The traffic signals appeared designed by schizophrenic graphic designers. Pedestrians hurled themselves into intersections like feral pigeons auditioning for lawsuits. By the time I dropped my family off, I leaned toward my wife and quietly informed her that I was considering retirement from driving altogether.

    They did not laugh.

    Because they’ve begun noticing the cracks too.

    And this is where the Speedo delusion enters the story.

    Give a man enough money, enough Ozempic, enough oceanfront property, and enough panic about aging, and eventually he will parade across a Maui beach in Lycra briefs convinced he has conquered time itself. But the spectacle never communicates triumph. It communicates fear. The tighter the Speedo, the louder the desperation.

    You can optimize the body. You can chemically suppress appetite. You can biohack your sleep, inject peptides into your abdomen, freeze your face, laser your skin, and marry someone young enough to regard Nirvana as “classic rock.” But eventually the truth arrives anyway: youth culture is moving in one direction while you are moving in another.

    No amount of Hawaiian sunlight can conceal the gap forever.