With my wife and twin daughters making the long drive home from San Francisco, I realized someone had to restock the household pantry. That someone was me. So by 8 a.m., I was wandering the fluorescent aisles of Trader Joe’s, still half-asleep, in search of tempeh, oat milk, and maybe a reason to keep going.
Twenty seconds in, I spotted Eliot—a jazz musician in his early forties who’s worked there forever and knows every spice rack and frozen entrée by memory. I hadn’t seen him in a while. He asked if I’d retired from teaching at the local college yet.
“Two more years,” I said, adding, “but who knows what’s happening to writing classes in the Age of ChatGPT. Everyone talks like they know. They don’t.”
He asked how I’m handling it in the classroom.
“I’m not sure I am,” I told him. “I can teach. I can perform. I can entertain. But grading online essays? That’s an existential crisis wrapped in a PDF. I’m dancing in quicksand.”
Eliot nodded grimly. “This generation doesn’t read.”
“My daughters don’t,” I said. “Their friends don’t. They’re sweet kids, empathetic and funny, but they don’t seem built for a world that requires deadlines, grit, or employment.”
Eliot, without hesitation: “We’re screwed.”
“And there’s no going back,” I said. “CNN gets out-watched by Joe Rogan. Most people get their facts from guys yelling into ring lights while drinking protein shakes.”
We stared into the epistemic abyss together, nodded, and parted ways before we started crying in the chip aisle.
Twenty minutes later, I made it to the checkout line, where I was greeted by Megan—the tall, soft-spoken vegan cashier who’s known me for years. She had just broken up with her boyfriend and noticed the mountain of super-firm tofu in my cart.
We exchanged tofu recipes, talked about the protein digestibility scale, and mourned the impossibility of plant-based love in a society fueled by backyard barbecue. Her breakup, as it turns out, was partly due to meat incompatibility. “He grilled like it was a belief system,” she said.
We also touched—briefly—on factory farming, which always makes me want to cry or scream or stop eating altogether. But just like I couldn’t solve the collapse of literacy and truth with Eliot, I couldn’t solve the meat-industrial complex with Megan.
All I could do was pay for my groceries and accept the fact that I’m a limited man in a crumbling culture, armed with tofu, oat milk, and a Costco-sized tub of almond butter.
I loaded the trunk with the small consolation that I had, at the very least, fed my family.
Cinemorphosis 
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