As a child of the 1960s, I possessed a vivid understanding of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, thanks less to geopolitics than to my devoted viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The cartoon’s Russian-accented villains, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, were forever skulking around America attempting to steal military secrets, sabotage technology, or siphon jet fuel under orders from their unseen despot, Fearless Leader. Serving the fictional nation of Pottsylvania—a barely disguised Soviet Union with worse lighting and thicker accents—they represented the eternal communist menace lurking just beyond the free world’s picket fence. Even as a little kid, I understood the basic message: America and Russia were locked in a planetary knife fight for domination, and everybody was expected to pick a side.
Television in those days functioned as a kind of patriotic catechism. Cartoon after cartoon, drama after drama, taught me who stood atop the hierarchy of masculine excellence. The Goalkeepers of Dominance were not poets, philosophers, or accountants. They were military men. Fighter pilots. Astronauts. Decorated officers with square jaws, crew cuts, and enough technical competence to vaporize enemy nations before breakfast.
One such exemplar was Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie. Major Nelson was an astronaut, Air Force officer, scientist, and possessor of the sort of clean-cut competence television regarded as irresistible to women and essential to national survival. Naturally, fate rewarded him accordingly. Stranded on a beach after a space mission, he discovered Jeannie, played by my first great childhood crush, Barbara Eden, a blonde goddess in a pink harem costume who emerged from a bottle prepared to devote herself entirely to his happiness.
This did not strike me as unrealistic.
Television had already instructed me that men possessing advanced military rank and scientific aptitude were the Alphas of civilization. These men piloted rockets, commanded bases, protected democracy, and consequently received the lion’s share of earthly rewards: prestige, adventure, beautiful women, and thunderously triumphant theme music swelling behind them as they strode across the screen. Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie discovering Jeannie, played by Barbara Eden, never struck me as fantasy. It seemed more like proper cosmic compensation for loyal service to the American empire. Risk your life for freedom, master aerospace technology, and eventually a gorgeous blonde genie materializes on a beach devoted entirely to your happiness. Such was the moral arithmetic of 1960s television.
But television was not my only instructor in Alpha Behavior.
My father taught the course at home.
Every day I was reminded of his military pedigree when I quietly entered my parents’ bedroom and stared at the framed Army photograph resting on the dresser beside my mother’s jewelry box with its perfumes, rings, tangled necklaces, and atomized clouds of Evening in Paris glamour. Nearby sat my father’s modest silver Timex watch ticking softly through the years like the heartbeat of working-class American masculinity itself. Together these objects formed a strange domestic altar: beauty, time, marriage, discipline, and the fading aura of Cold War heroism.
The photograph dominated everything around it.
In the picture, my father, a young Army gunner in the late 1950s, stood in immaculate military dress uniform with the rigid bearing of a man who believed discipline, patriotism, and artillery fire could keep civilization from collapsing into barbarism. The dark uniform bestowed upon him an almost mythological authority beneath the soft bedroom light. His military cap rested perfectly above a face so sharply cut it looked sculpted from granite by a Pentagon propagandist commissioned to manufacture the ideal American warrior for recruitment posters. His bold eyebrows and dark eyes did not merely face the camera—they radiated fearless confidence, the kind possessed by men who believed they could march directly into gunfire and emerge untouched by history. He held his rifle across his chest with solemn authority, as if permanently prepared to defend his honor, his country, or perhaps simply his parking space.
Like Major Nelson, my father belonged to that sacred fraternity of Gatekeepers of Dominance whose lives seemed full of lessons about toughness, competition, hierarchy, and victory.
In fact, without my father’s ruthless competitive instincts, I might never have existed at all.
During his Army years in Anchorage, Alaska, my father became embroiled in a romantic rivalry with another soldier named John Shalikashvili, who would later rise to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time, however, both men were merely ambitious young servicemen competing for the affection of my teenage mother after meeting her in a tavern.
The future fate of American military leadership—and my own biological existence—apparently hinged upon who possessed superior courtship logistics.
The rivalry paused briefly over Christmas when Shalikashvili returned home to Peoria, Illinois, while my father flew to Hollywood, Florida, to visit family. But my father, sensing opportunity the way a battlefield commander senses enemy weakness, decided to return to Anchorage several days early in order to reclaim tactical advantage.
There was only one problem.
His cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor sedan was malfunctioning.
The Lucas fuel filter had failed, and the local auto parts store still lacked a replacement. Lesser men might have surrendered to mechanical fate. My father instead improvised.
Using his only prophylactic and a paperclip, he engineered a makeshift repair to keep the fuel pump from sticking open or closed. It was less an automobile repair than a strange act of battlefield ingenuity, the sort of thing that sounds too absurd to be true but somehow becomes more believable precisely because it involves Army men in Alaska during the Cold War.
The improvised contraption worked well enough to get him to Seattle, where he boarded the ferry to Alaska and arrived back in Anchorage forty-eight hours ahead of his rival.
Forty-eight hours.
That was the margin separating General Shalikashvili’s alternate future from mine.
Nine months later, on October 28, 1961, I was born.
After observing future John Shalikashvili lose the reproductive arms race to my father, I received my second brutal lesson in competitive dominance at the age of five.
By then I had constructed my first bachelor pad: a crude treehouse on the grounds of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. Calling it a “treehouse” may be generous. It was essentially several weathered planks nailed into a tree by boys who possessed neither engineering skills nor concern for mortality. But to me it was magnificent—a penthouse suite suspended above civilization itself.
One afternoon I attempted to lure Tammy Leidecker into my airborne kingdom using what I believed to be irresistible bait: a small red box of Sun-Maid raisins.
I flashed the box proudly at the bottom of the tree. The package itself radiated authority. The Sun-Maid girl held an enormous tray of grapes while glowing inside a halo of yellow light and white triangles like some Protestant saint canonized by the California Raisin Board. She wore a red bonnet and smiled with wholesome confidence, as if assuring the public that dried fruit represented the pinnacle of human pleasure.
“Come up here!” I shouted to Tammy.
And miracle of miracles—she began climbing.
Slowly she ascended the wooden slats toward my treehouse while I basked in premature romantic triumph.
Then disaster struck.
From a neighboring tree emerged my rival, Zane Johnson, jutting his head through a cluster of leaves like a jungle insurgent launching psychological warfare.
“I’ve got something WAY better than raisins!” he shouted.
Then he revealed them.
Captain Kangaroo Cookies.
Not ordinary cookies.
Cream-filled sandwich cookies.
Double-fudge artillery.
Zane held the package aloft with the swagger of a used-car salesman unveiling a fully loaded Cadillac. The moment I saw those cookies, my heart collapsed into my stomach.
I instantly understood how Mick Jagger must have felt in 1964 while standing backstage watching James Brown perform his legendary cape routine. Brown would stagger theatrically, collapse from exhaustion, then resurrect himself in a frenzy of sweat and transcendence while the audience lost its collective mind. Those close to Jagger later said he looked shattered watching the performance because he knew no mortal human should attempt to follow it.
That was exactly how I felt staring at Zane Johnson’s cookies while clutching my pathetic little raisins like a bankrupt peasant holding expired currency.
I already knew the outcome before it happened.
Tammy froze halfway up my tree.
She turned slowly toward Zane’s cookies with the greedy reverence prospectors reserve for gold bullion. Then she looked back at my raisins and gave them a tiny sneer of contempt so devastating it could have been delivered by a Parisian food critic.
Moments later she descended my tree, sprinted toward Zane’s fortress, and climbed his wooden slats with astonishing athleticism.
Traitor.
Soon the two of them sat together inside his treehouse devouring cream-filled chocolate sandwiches while I remained alone in my pathetic dried-fruit kingdom like an overthrown monarch of nutritional austerity.
When they finished eating, they licked the frosting from their lips and openly gloated at me.
I had lost.
Not merely the girl.
The entire competition.
As I watched them nestle together in sugar-fueled intimacy, I reclined inside my abandoned treehouse and cried myself to sleep. I imagine it resembled the way Mick Jagger privately wept after witnessing James Brown annihilate the laws of stage performance.
Several hours later I awoke screaming.
Red fire ants had swarmed the treehouse.
Presumably attracted by the raisins, the tiny sadists covered my body from head to toe. The pain was biblical. It felt as though every inch of my flesh had been flogged with electrified stinging nettles.
I tore down the tree and sprinted back to our apartment shrieking while my mother threw me into a scalding bath to drown the ants.
As I sat there nursing my swollen welts, I interpreted the entire ordeal with the melodramatic seriousness available only to children and future writers.
The lesson was obvious.
In the evolutionary arms race between Sun-Maid Raisins and Captain Kangaroo Cookies, the cookies had won.
That day the connection between alpha status, superior bait, and reproductive success burned itself permanently into my lizard brain.
I never entered the treehouse again.
It remained abandoned afterward, slowly decaying among the branches with only a few relics left behind to testify that someone had once inhabited it: plastic army men, toy cars, gum wrappers, fragments of failed boyhood ambition.
After the red-ant catastrophe, I retreated increasingly indoors and 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, on my ninth birthday, Jeannie came one final time.
She entered through the window quietly and told me this would be her last visit. I was becoming too old, she explained. It was time for me to meet real girls—girls who did not materialize magically through bedroom windows in clouds of moonlit fantasy.
I argued with her desperately.
I told her I loved her.
But she only smiled sadly before retreating backward into a soft gray mist and disappearing forever.
I never saw her again.
Years later, after teaching myself piano, I spent nearly three years composing a piece called “Dreaming of Barbara Eden” in a futile attempt to recreate the heartbreaking music that accompanied her dream visitations.
The composition captures perhaps half the beauty of those dreams.
Which, considering the limitations of mortal art, is probably the best I could have hoped for. And for that, I am grateful.
Cinemorphosis 
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