Cinemorphosis

Author: Jeffrey McMahon

  • Shifting from literary delusion to real work

    Shifting from literary delusion to real work

    Much of my so-called rehabilitation boiled down to admitting the humiliating truth: I wasn’t just a failed writer—I was the lowest form of literary life, a wannabe. A person who didn’t write so much as perform the idea of being a writer. A cosplay novelist, strutting around in the costume of a tortured genius while producing little more than pretentious drivel and a growing pile of abandoned manuscripts. It wasn’t just about impressing others; it was about impressing myself, clinging to the illusion that I was part of some grand tradition of suffering scribes.

    True rehab meant ditching the farce, but not the writing itself. That would have been its own brand of self-sabotage—flipping the table and storming off because I couldn’t be Tolstoy. No, the real challenge wasn’t quitting writing; it was quitting the wrong kind of writing, the one that had wasted decades of my life. What that left me with, I wasn’t sure. But I knew one thing: I had to approach writing with a level of honesty and discipline my past posturing had never allowed.

    To guide this shift from literary delusion to something resembling actual work, I turned to Steven Pressfield’s manifesto The War of Art: Break Through the Block and Win Your Inner Creative Battles. If anyone understood the difference between real work and creative self-deception, it was him. And if I was going to claw my way out of my own nonsense, I needed a drill sergeant, not another enabler.

    Steven Pressfield does not sugarcoat the reality of writing. Sit down at the keyboard, and you’re not just typing—you’re waging a spiritual war. The enemy? A malevolent, shape-shifting force hellbent on keeping you from producing anything meaningful. It doesn’t want you to write. It doesn’t want you to create. It doesn’t even want you to try. Instead, it wants you lulled into the soft coma of complacency, soothed by self-indulgence, and sedated by excuses. Pressfield has a name for this insidious saboteur: Resistance.

    And Resistance isn’t just out to destroy your writing career. It’s an all-purpose wrecking ball, ready to demolish anything of value in your life. Want to exercise? Resistance whispers, “Tomorrow.” Want to eat healthy? Resistance hands you a menu and points at the nachos. Thinking of saving your marriage, reconnecting with an old friend, or simply being a functional human being? Resistance assures you that Netflix is easier. Resistance thrives on inertia, feeding off your lowest instincts until your grand ambitions are reduced to doomscrolling and DoorDash. As far as Resistance is concerned, there is no higher self—only Bread and Circus, perpetual comfort, and a well-padded existential void.

    But then Pressfield throws a curveball, one that had me stop mid-page, coffee cup hovering in midair. He insists that each of us has been gifted by the divine with “our own unique genius.” A talent, a calling, something only we can do. A mission we’re supposed to fulfill.

    Which led me to a harsh realization: If I wasn’t the brilliant comic novelist I had once deluded myself into believing I was—if my grand literary dreams had been little more than feverish cosplay—then what the hell was my so-called genius? Because, according to Pressfield, if I wasn’t meant to write the next Confederacy of Dunces, then surely I had something up my sleeve. Right?

    Unless, of course, Resistance had already won.

    As I read Pressfield’s case studies in human self-sabotage, it dawns on me: Resistance isn’t just some minor inconvenience—it’s a full-blown existential heist, engineered to ensure we squander our brief time on this planet in a haze of cheap dopamine and deferred dreams. It doesn’t just want us to fail; it wants us to fail happily, lulled into a state of passive indulgence, too numbed by distraction to notice the slow-motion car wreck of our own potential.

    The real danger? Not taking it seriously. Resistance thrives on skepticism. It wants you to roll your eyes, to dismiss it as some overblown metaphor. Pressfield, however, has a blunt rebuttal for the doubters: “You think Resistance isn’t real? Resistance will bury you.” And judging by the graveyard of abandoned projects and untapped ambitions littering my past, I’d say he’s got a point.

    Pressfield doesn’t tiptoe around Resistance—he paints it as nothing short of a demonic force hellbent on sabotaging your higher self. It doesn’t just nudge you toward procrastination; it actively conspires to keep you from doing anything meaningful. It thrives on your fear, swells with power whenever you’re on the cusp of finishing something worthwhile, and works tirelessly to convince you that life is a low-stakes game of distractions and indulgence.

    Interestingly, therapist Phil Stutz arrives at the same conclusion, albeit with a different branding. He calls this malevolent force Part X, but the function remains identical: an invisible saboteur that keeps you stuck in mediocrity, endlessly scrolling, doom-looping, and putting off your real work until tomorrow—which, of course, never arrives. Like Pressfield, Stutz insists that Resistance is baked into the human condition and that pretending it doesn’t exist is the surest way to let it consume you.

    In this sense, Pressfield and Stutz aren’t just self-help gurus; they’re high priests of a secular, no-nonsense religion: You are broken. The world is against you. And your only path to salvation is relentless discipline. Where many pop psychologists coddle their audiences with affirmations and vague pep talks about “self-care,” these two take a more Calvinist approach: Get to work. Expect suffering. Resist Resistance. The stakes, as they present them, are nothing short of existential—fail to fight back, and you risk not only losing your dreams but your very humanity.

    While Stutz takes a broader view, Pressfield zeros in on the artist, especially the writer. According to him, Resistance manifests in a litany of self-destructive behaviors: compulsive procrastination, fixation on meaningless relationships, and a penchant for creating unnecessary chaos—all to avoid sitting down and doing the real work. He argues that many of us invite drama into our lives simply because it provides an excuse not to write. The more absurd, the better.

    Case in point: Pressfield would have a field day with the stories I see on the medical drama The Pitt, where patients flood the ER for spectacularly self-inflicted disasters. One woman flew across the country to let a TikTok stranger inject industrial-grade silicone into her backside—only to end up fighting for her life. Another, a social media influencer, poisoned herself with black-market beauty products laced with mercury, resulting in a psychotic break. These people didn’t just stumble into chaos; they practically RSVP’d to it. Pressfield would argue that their tragicomic misfortunes weren’t just poor decisions but acts of subconscious sabotage—distractions from the real, difficult work of self-improvement.

    And if I’m being honest, I see shades of my own dysfunction in these cautionary tales. For years, I convinced myself I was a comic novelist, spinning out unreadable manuscripts like a literary assembly line worker with no quality control. But was I really writing novels? Or was I just using the idea of writing as a nervous tic, a way to avoid more meaningful work? The answer is painfully clear.

    By Pressfield’s definition, I wasn’t an artist—I was a graphomaniac. If trichotillomania is the compulsive need to pluck out your own hair, Graphomania Nervosa is the compulsive need to churn out unpublishable novels, deluding yourself into thinking you’re “making progress” while really just spinning your wheels. The symptoms? Excessive keyboard abuse, delusions of literary grandeur, and an uncanny ability to ignore decades of failure. I wasn’t battling Resistance; I was collaborating with it. And that, I now realize, was the ultimate act of self-sabotage.

    How insidious is Resistance? According to Pressfield, it’s the invisible puppet master behind an entire industry of syndromes, disorders, and afflictions—many of which, he argues, are little more than theatrical productions staged by our own subconscious. It’s so pervasive that most people don’t miss work because of actual illness, but because of what he calls self-dramatized ailments. In other words, Resistance isn’t just an obstacle; it’s a world-builder. It conjures up entire pathologies, complete with a supporting cast of “experts,” a library of bestselling self-help books, and a pharmaceutical buffet of magic pills designed to “treat” the very conditions it invents.

    These manufactured miseries feed into a culture of victimhood, where suffering—real or imagined—becomes a lifestyle brand. The narcissist doesn’t just endure their personal afflictions; they curate them, transforming their burdens into a kind of tragic, self-congratulatory art. Pressfield published The War of Art in 2002, long before TikTok turned self-diagnosis into an Olympic sport. But if he were writing it today, he’d have a field day watching an entire generation swap productivity for performative ailments, trading ambition for an endless loop of “What obscure mental illness do you have?” quizzes. Resistance has upgraded—now it comes with filters, hashtags, and a monetization strategy.

    The passage in The War of Art that truly floored me—the one that made me put the book down and stare into the abyss—was Pressfield’s take on choosing a mate. He writes: “Sometimes, if we’re not conscious of our own Resistance, we’ll pick as a mate someone who has or is successfully overcoming Resistance.” He admits he’s not entirely sure why this happens, but speculates that perhaps we’re drawn to those who radiate the strength we so conspicuously lack, as if their sheer competence might rub off on us through prolonged exposure.

    That hit a little too close to home. My wife, for example, is a master of keeping Resistance at bay. She doesn’t get derailed by distractions, doesn’t spiral into existential meltdowns over minor inconveniences, and certainly doesn’t spend years chasing some ill-fated literary delusion. She’s disciplined, focused, and—here’s the real kicker—consistently gets things done. Meanwhile, I have the emotional resilience of a soufflé in an earthquake. One unexpected hiccup in my day, and I’m either catastrophizing or indulging in some elaborate form of procrastination disguised as “creative struggle.”

    Pressfield argues that when an underachiever pairs up with an overachiever, the real villain isn’t just personal inadequacy—it’s Resistance itself, warping love into a lopsided power dynamic. He writes: “This is how Resistance disfigures love. The stew it creates is rich, it’s colorful; Tennessee Williams could work it up into a trilogy. But is it love? If we’re the supporting partner, shouldn’t we face our own failure to pursue our unlived life, rather than hitchhike on our spouse’s coattails?”

    Translation: if you’re the slacker in the relationship, maybe instead of basking in your partner’s competence like a freeloading houseplant, you should actually do something with your life. The hard truth is, Pressfield doesn’t just suggest that people like me might be hitchhiking on our spouse’s ambition—he flat-out states it. And honestly? He’s right. Maybe instead of cranking out unreadable novels no one asked for, I should grab a ladder and start clearing the rain gutters.

    Facing the reality of my failed novelist career doesn’t mean I should retire my keyboard and resign myself to a life of watching my rain gutters fill with leaves. Yes, I lingered in the fiction world like an uninvited guest at a dinner party, well past the point where someone should have taken my coat and quietly ushered me to the door. But if Pressfield’s The War of Art has taught me anything, it’s that surrendering to Resistance—believing its insidious whisper that I have nothing to contribute—is the fastest way to irrelevance.

    Resistance tried to pull the same trick on Pressfield himself. It told him he was a novelist, not a self-help guru, and had no business writing a manifesto on creativity and spiritual stamina. But he ignored that voice, wrote The War of Art anyway, and watched it outsell every other book he’d ever written. Resistance took a brutal loss that day—but like a bad ex, it never really disappears. It always circles back, lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect moment to convince you that quitting is the rational choice. The trick is seeing it for what it is: a con artist with the same tired sales pitch. And I, for one, refuse to buy in.

  • Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    Wrestling with an especially virulent case of “Influenza A”

    In I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional: The Recovery Movement and Other Self-Help Fashions, Wendy Kaminer lays waste to the therapeutic fads of the 1990s, particularly the trend of “reclaiming the inner child”—a ritual that took infantilization to near-religious extremes.

    She describes John Bradshaw’s workshops, where grown adults with respectable careers arrived clutching teddy bears like traumatized toddlers, preparing to embark on a guided journey into the mansion of their past. There, as Bradshaw whispered encouragements, lower lips trembled, tears streamed, and a congregation of emotionally overqualified professionals sobbed into the polyester fur of their stuffed animals.

    What floored Kaminer wasn’t the unhinged emotionalism—it was the sheer, shameless conviction. These people weren’t just indulging in a saccharine, self-indulgent spectacle—they were true believers, convinced that squeezing a doll and reliving some long-buried playground trauma was nothing short of a spiritual awakening.

    Kaminer was not impressed. What others saw as self-reflection and healing, she saw as an infantilizing orgy of narcissism, a self-help séance in which grown-ups tried to resurrect their inner kindergartener, only to be possessed by a ghost that refused to leave.

    Now, I’d like to say that my bullshit detector is too finely tuned for me to cradle a stuffed animal and regress into baby talk. But the bitter irony is that writing this memoir has forced me into my own brand of infantilization—just without the teddy bear and group cry session.

    Nothing made this clearer than the pathetic spectacle of my post-Thanksgiving downfall, which started with a game of Russian roulette—except instead of a revolver, I played with rotting cabbage.

    It all began when I decided to make chicken tacos—a wholesome, adult dinner choice. Unfortunately, the bag of shredded cabbage I retrieved from the fridge had been marinating in its own decay for two weeks, slowly transforming into hell’s compost pile.

    The moment I tore open the bag, my wife recoiled with the dramatic flair of a crime scene detective stumbling upon a long-decomposed body. She clutched her nose, waved her hands like an exorcist warding off a demon, and issued a forensic report:

    “That smells like a mix of a latrine and a horse’s taint.”

    A normal person would have taken this as a warning. But, fueled by misplaced confidence and the hubris of someone who had survived worse, I dumped the cabbage on my tacos and dug in.

    Hours later, my immune system, weakened by the Thanksgiving marathon of forced hospitality, collapsed like a debt-ridden empire. The virus that had been lurking in the shadows seized its moment, and by the next morning, I was a feverish, shivering wreck, contemplating my life choices between bouts of violent gastrointestinal reckoning.

    It seems that you don’t need a stuffed animal and a therapy circle to regress into infancy. Sometimes, all it takes is spoiled cabbage and a ruinous lack of self-preservation.

    Naturally, instead of exercising common sense, I channeled my inner cheapskate prophet. “Cabbage by its very nature has a funky scent,” I proclaimed with the confidence of a man who regularly courts disaster. “A little fermentation won’t hurt anyone.” My wife frowned and said, “It’s smelling up the entire kitchen.”
    “We’ll be fine,” I insisted, scooping copious amounts of fetid-smelling cabbage onto my tacos like I was auditioning for a daredevil cooking show.

    At dinner, I was the only one brave—or foolish—enough to eat it. Within an hour, my body issued a resounding, “You absolute moron.” No GI issues, but I felt like I’d been hit by a truck, reversed over, and then hit again. My head throbbed, my eyes were so sensitive to light I had to drape a T-shirt over my face just to listen to a Netflix show, and my energy flatlined by eight p.m. I crawled into bed, feeling like a half-baked zombie.

    The next morning was worse. Still no GI problems, but the 101 fever and crushing fatigue made me question my will to live. I tried to eat some oatmeal and grapefruit, the culinary equivalent of punishment food, but even that felt like too much effort. 

    By day three, no improvement. I’d become a cautionary tale, researching induced vomiting and discovering it was far too late. Apparently, if you don’t purge immediately, the toxins settle in like an unwanted houseguest who insists on staying for five to seven days.

    Being sick in my family makes everyone else suffer. Our teenage twins require constant care, frequent snacks that generate endless dirty dishes, and someone breathing down their necks to ensure homework gets done. My wife had to shoulder it all while I languished in my misery. I apologized profusely for my reckless hubris and promised, at the age of sixty-three, to turn over a new leaf—or at least stop eating ones that reek like death.

    For decades, I’d treated eating old, moldy food like a badge of honor, quoting my dad’s immortal wisdom: “Pilgrims who ate blue cheese on the Mayflower survived disease while the mold-avoiders died.” It was as if I’d been brainwashed into believing spoiled food was a superfood. But this cabbage debacle—this hellish, cabbage-induced reckoning—put the fear of God in me. Never again would I be the fool who eats something that smells like a medieval torture chamber. This time, I mean it. The next funky bag of cabbage? Straight to the trash. May it ferment in peace.

    As the alleged food-borne illness dragged on and my fever turned my brain into a swamp, I found myself pondering a morbid yet painfully stupid thought: What if I died because I was too cheap to toss a two-dollar bag of cabbage? Imagine the headline: “Man Perishes Over Discount Vegetables.” How could I ever forgive myself for such world-class idiocy? Worse, how could my wife ever forget that I lectured her with the smug confidence of a food-safety guru right before scarfing down a fatal dose of rotting produce? I’d be immortalized as the kind of hapless buffoon who wouldn’t even get a name in a Chekhov short story—just “The Idiot Who Ate the Cabbage.”

    Then, because fever dreams and existential crises go hand in hand, another absurd thought hit me: How would my YouTube subscribers and Instagram followers know what happened to me? I’d be gone, but my accounts would still sit there, ghostlike, leaving them to wonder why the witty guy with the diver watches and snack obsession suddenly went dark. What a tragedy—I wouldn’t even get the chance to create a final piece of content documenting my own demise in comedic glory. A video titled, “How Cabbage Killed Me (And Why You Should Toss Yours)” would surely have gone viral.

    This realization struck me as profoundly twisted: content creators care more about producing “engaging material” than their own mortality. Forget self-preservation—I was more upset that my audience might miss out on the hilarity of my self-inflicted cabbage-related downfall. The pathology runs deep: we’re so hooked on being performative, we’d probably narrate our own deaths if we could. Imagine me, breathless and feverish, croaking out, “Don’t forget to like, comment, and subscribe—assuming I make it to tomorrow.” The absurdity of it all made me laugh, which hurt, because even my ribs were exhausted from this cabbage-induced purgatory.

    It was apparent I was so desperate to be relevant on social media that I had become a Gravefluencer–an influencer who extends his reach six feet under, ensuring even death is on-brand.

    After five days of relentless illness, I had a phone consultation with my doctor about what I was sure was self-inflicted food poisoning. I laid out the symptoms with the kind of detail you’d expect from someone auditioning for a medical drama. My doctor listened patiently, then unceremoniously popped my bubble of absurdity. “This isn’t food poisoning,” she said. “You’ve got the flu. It’s going around.”

    Just like that, my grand narrative of culinary hubris—the man who dared to defy rancid cabbage and paid the ultimate price—was dead. Instead, I was left with something far less glamorous: virulent flu. Part of me was relieved that I wasn’t poisoning myself with poisoned produce, but another part of me felt cheated. I’d lost the absurd, darkly comedic morality tale about a man so cheap he nearly killed himself over a two-dollar bag of cabbage. What a waste.

    The doctor wasn’t exactly brimming with solutions, either. “Rest and stay hydrated,” she advised, the way you might tell a child to eat their vegetables. That night, my fever spiked close to 104, launching me into a kaleidoscope of fever dreams where my brain decided to give me the full surrealist experience. Words from my podcasts took on physical forms—spiky, sticky, grotesque shapes—and suddenly, I was inside them. I wandered through caves of conversation, waded through cocoons of dialogue, and got tangled in thick spider webs spun from language. Each sentence wrapped around me, trapping me in its endless loops of nonsense.

    When I woke up, drenched in sweat and feeling like I’d wrestled a linguistically gifted tarantula, I realized the flu wasn’t just an illness—it was a full-blown avant-garde art installation happening in my own head. So no, I didn’t have food poisoning. I had performance art fever. And while it wasn’t the cabbage apocalypse I’d hoped for, it was plenty weird in its own way.

    For six days, I had been wrestling with the so-called “Thanksgiving Flu,” a charming little virus that kept my fever bouncing between 101 and 104, as if my body were auditioning for a medical melodrama. Being that sick wasn’t just about physical misery—it was a battering ram smashing through the cozy little mental structures I had built around my life. Aspirations? Pointless. Health goals? A cruel joke. My reading list? Forget it. Even my hunger for social belonging and validation had been knocked flat. What remained was a stripped-down nihilism so bleak it made Nietzsche look like an optimist.

    Sickness dragged me to a dark place where life felt like a cosmic prank. I could almost hear my 14-year-old self rolling his eyes as I remembered my Grandma Mildred’s wise words from one of her letters: “Illnesses bring out the doldrums.” No kidding, Grandma. That particular flu had brought out more than the doldrums—it had conjured a maudlin cocktail of despair and self-pity.

    In that state, I found myself spiraling into melodrama, muttering things like, “What’s the point? Just end the torment and let me meet my Maker already!” It was ridiculous, of course, but I couldn’t help but notice how flu-induced misery fed into a distinctly male flavor of narcissism. Egotism, after all, was a hallmark of the man-child: the guy who thought the universe should pause when he didn’t get his way.

    Men, it seemed, were uniquely gifted at turning minor discomforts into existential crises. While women powered through illness with a mix of stoicism and practicality, men turned their sickbeds into thrones of self-pity, proclaiming their impending doom to anyone who would listen. And me? I was no exception. With every feverish shiver, I became the star of my own overwrought drama, raging against the cruelty of a world that dared to continue spinning while I wallowed in flu-induced existential despair.

    Sure, Grandma Mildred, the doldrums were part of the package—but why did it feel like men turned those doldrums into an art form? Perhaps the real flu virus wasn’t in my body; it was in my ego, throwing a tantrum because life wasn’t bending to my fevered will.

    I appeared to be languishing in the Flu-tile State—a fever-fueled realization that all human endeavor was futile.

    On day 8 of this flu from hell, my doctor emailed me a cheerful little grenade: “Your symptoms are concerning. I need to see you today.” Fabulous. At 11 a.m., feverish, grouchy, and radiating the energy of a half-cooked zombie, I dragged myself to her office for the usual poking and prodding. COVID? Negative. Influenza? Oh yes, Influenza A—the viral overachiever of the season. My nurse, who’d had it two weeks earlier, gave me the kind of pep talk you’d expect from someone who survived a minor apocalypse. “Seven days of fever,” she chirped, “so you’ve probably got two more to go!” Like I’d won a spa weekend in purgatory.

    But the flu wasn’t the real sucker punch. No, that came when I stepped on the scale. At a soul-crushing 252 pounds, with blood pressure at 166 over 92, Dr. Okada laid it out with the dispassion of someone reading a menu: “You’re at high risk for a massive stroke or heart attack.” She might as well have handed me a shovel and a map to my future grave. Then, just to twist the knife, she added, “You need to lose fifty pounds in six months. Otherwise…” She trailed off, but I got the point: dead man waddling.

    Her final blow came with a steely gaze and a guilt grenade: “If not for yourself, lose weight for your wife and daughters.” Translation: stop being selfish and get your act together before they have to plan your funeral.

    Desperate for a cheat code, I asked about Mounjaro or Ozempic, those miracle weight-loss injectables I’d read about. She barely stifled a laugh. “We prescribe those for people with exclusive employer benefits.” I muttered something about how my college likely doesn’t cover luxury drugs, and her thin smile confirmed it. I’d be fighting this battle the old-fashioned way: with the DASH diet and restricted calories, not cutting-edge pharmaceuticals.

    And then there was the Motrin ban. Apparently, my go-to painkiller was a blood-pressure ticking time bomb. “No more Motrin. Tylenol only,” she said, with all the enthusiasm of a waiter recommending the tofu option. So now, my fevers would be accompanied by a dull, Tylenol-soaked march toward mortality. Fantastic.

    I thanked her—sincerely, I swear—because she wasn’t wrong. But the whole thing felt like I’d been blindsided by a particularly grim episode of The Biggest Loser: Medical Edition. On the drive home, Miley Cyrus’s “Flowers (Demo)” came on, and I—feverish, bloated, and thoroughly defeated—actually cried. Miley crooned about resilience and self-love, and all I could think about was how laxity, that slow, sneaky killer, had been working me over for years. Skipped workouts, mindless snacks, every excuse—it had all led to this: a middle-aged man sobbing in his car, mourning his dignity while stuck in traffic.

    Dr. Okada’s tough love landed like a wrecking ball. This was my moment—the kind where you either turn your life around or start drafting your obituary. Time to put down the Motrin, pick up some discipline, and drag myself back from the brink before I became the subject of one of those tragic lessons everyone ignores until it’s too late cautionary tales.

    I had entered the clinic expecting to get a quick flu diagnosis and maybe a lecture about rest and fluids. Instead, I walked out with the realization that my life wasn’t just off-track; it was an unmitigated dumpster fire rolling downhill. How had I missed it? The creeping wreckage of my existence had been unfolding right under my nose, like a slow-motion train derailment I refused to acknowledge. Denial, thy name is me.

    Dr. Okada, bless her clinical professionalism, had held up a mirror and forced me to see what I’d been expertly avoiding for years: that my life, much like my blood pressure, was a ticking time bomb. I’d been blind to my own unraveling, and now the blinders were off. The view wasn’t pretty, but at least now I knew what I was working with—a fixer-upper existence in desperate need of a renovation.

    My visit to the doctor turned into an unplanned catalyst for a long-overdue moral metamorphosis. I left not just diagnosed, but afflicted by a new condition I can only call the Scales of Justice (and Shame)—that peculiar state where the doctor’s scale transforms into the ultimate moral arbiter. Each number glaring back at me didn’t just measure pounds; it weighed my life choices, my discipline, my worthiness as a functioning adult. It was less a medical device and more a courtroom, and let’s just say I was found guilty on all counts.

    I was convinced that had I been ten years older, this bout of influenza would have finished me off. The first week felt less like an illness and more like the aftermath of a roadside bombing, with me as the unfortunate bystander left mangled in a ditch. My body was a buffet for phantom wolves and mosquitoes—every nerve ending seemed to host its own ravenous pest. Mentally, I spiraled into fever-induced madness, complete with hallucinatory jungle scenes: Gumby-esque AI bodybuilders, sculpted and sinewy yet gelatinous, painted the revolting hue of yellow sea slugs, slithered around me in an Amazonian hellscape.

    By Week Three, the influenza had mercifully downgraded its malevolence, though “mild” feels like an insult to language. I still shivered like a Victorian orphan in a snowstorm, my body temperature yoyoing between inferno and tundra. Aches gnawed at me persistently, like bad houseguests who don’t get the hint. And mentally? I was underwater—grasping at reality as it floats just out of reach. My brain felt stripped of a few critical screws, rattling around and threatening to unscrew the rest.

    At some point, I recalled, in the hazy, fevered way of someone stranded in a desert, that my daughter had lozenges in her room. Fueled by desperation, I shuffled to her door, knocked weakly, and thrust my trembling hands forward as if auditioning for a Dickens adaptation. “Please,” I croaked, my voice barely above a whisper, “fill my hands with lozenges for your poor ailing father.”

    The response? Hysterical laughter. Both of my daughters, cozied up watching TV, howled with the kind of delight usually reserved for viral cat videos. I caught a glimpse of myself in the hallway mirror: pajamas wrinkled like a bad alibi, beanie perched jauntily askew, my face the pallor of a sickly sailor. I was every bit the tragicomic figure they saw—a fevered street urchin begging for cough drops.

    My wife, ever the realist, stormed in to restore order. “We have plenty of lozenges in the kitchen,” she barked, clearly unimpressed by my Oscar-worthy theatrics. She led me, limping and pathetic, to the cupboard, where she proceeded to dump several bags of lozenges onto the table with all the ceremony of Santa Claus unloading his sleigh. My daughters, tears of laughter streaming down their faces, declared me Oliver Twist reincarnated.

    I retreated to bed clutching a handful of lozenges, humiliated but momentarily soothed, only to lie awake wondering when this fever would break—or if the AI bodybuilders would show up again to finish the job.

    Four weeks into my bout with influenza, I emerged bleary-eyed, fever-wrecked, and staring down my old nemesis: addiction. Not the sexy kind you’d brag about in a memoir—just the creeping, mundane kind that comes with a tendency to overindulge in things like self-pity, compulsive behaviors, and yes, an irrational attachment to writing books.

    And so, I emerged from this fever-ridden odyssey not as a transformed man, but as someone who had simply suffered enough to pause and reflect—until the next catastrophe beckoned. If John Bradshaw were leading my recovery workshop, he’d likely hand me a stuffed animal and instruct me to embrace my inner child, soothing my cabbage-traumatized soul with affirmations of self-love. But after weeks of sweating, hallucinating, and contemplating my own obituary over a bag of rotting vegetables, I didn’t need a teddy bear. I needed a referee, a financial adviser, and possibly an exorcist.

    The true lesson here? My inner child doesn’t need rescuing. He needs a restraining order. Because left to his own devices, he’ll continue to eat spoiled food out of spite, spiral into existential despair at the first sign of adversity, and demand that every brush with mortality be converted into premium content. So if I’m to move forward as a recovering writing addict, I have to acknowledge this truth: The inner child is not a sage. He’s a lunatic. And I should probably stop taking his advice.

    CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

    As part of my rehabilitation from writing novels I have no business writing, I remind myself of an uncomfortable truth: 95% of books—both fiction and nonfiction—are just bloated short stories and essays with unnecessary padding. How many times have I read a novel and thought, This would have been a killer short story, but as a novel, it’s a slog? How often have I powered through a nonfiction screed only to realize that everything I needed was in the first chapter, and the rest was just an echo chamber of diminishing returns?

    Perhaps someday, I’ll learn to write an exceptional short story—the kind that punches above its weight, the kind that leaves you feeling like you’ve just read a 400-page novel even though it barely clears 30. It takes a rare kind of genius to pull off this magic trick. I think of Alice Munro’s layered portraits of regret, Lorrie Moore’s razor-sharp wit, and John Cheever’s meticulous dissections of suburban despair. I flip through my extra-large edition of The Stories of John Cheever, and three stand out like glittering relics: “The Swimmer,” “The Country Husband,” and “The Jewels of the Cabots.” Each is a self-contained universe, a potent literary multivitamin that somehow delivers all the nourishment of a novel in a single, concentrated dose. Let’s call these rare works Stories That Ate a Novel—compact, ferocious, and packed with enough emotional and intellectual weight to render lesser novels redundant.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I must seek out such stories, study them, and attempt to write them. Not just as an artistic exercise, but as a safeguard against relapse—the last thing I need is another 300-page corpse of a novel stinking up my hard drive.

    But maybe this is more than just a recovery plan. Maybe this is a new mission—championing Stories That Eat Novels. The cultural winds are shifting in my favor. Attention spans, gnawed to the bone by social media, no longer tolerate literary excess. Even the New York Times has noted the rise of the short novel, reporting in “To the Point: Short Novels Dominate International Booker Prize Nominees” that books under 200 pages are taking center stage. We may be witnessing a tectonic shift, an age where brevity is not just a virtue but a necessity.

    For a failed novelist and an unapologetic literary wind-sprinter, this could be my moment. I can already see it—my sleek, ruthless 160-page collection, Stories That Eat Novels, four lapidary masterpieces gleaming like finely cut diamonds. Rehabilitation has never felt so good. Who says a man in his sixties can’t find his literary niche and stage an artistic rebirth? Maybe I wasn’t a failed novelist after all—maybe I was just a short-form assassin waiting for the right age to arrive.

  • What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

    What does it feel like to be crushed beneath decades of writing addiction?

    What does it mean to be pinned down for decades by some vast, crushing force, an unmovable, soul-flattening monolith that convinces you of your own helplessness? More importantly, do we even want to be free from it, or is that liberation its own special kind of agony?

    This takes me back to 1970, watching Adam-12, one of my favorite TV shows, though I only remember one episode. A man was trapped under a fallen telephone pole, the weight pressing into his ribs. When paramedics arrived, they informed him they’d be using a crane to lift it off. “Funny,” the man remarked. “I don’t even feel any pain.” The paramedic’s response? You don’t feel pain now—but once we lift it, you will.

    That moment lodged itself in my brain like a splinter. Because, really, what is breaking free from an addiction if not having a telephone pole lifted off your chest? You think you’re ready for freedom, but then the weight is gone, and suddenly, every nerve in your body starts screaming. You had learned to live with the oppression, adapted to its limits, made peace with your own captivity. And now, you have to face everything that weight once shielded you from—all the wounds you ignored, all the realities you deferred, all the choices you never had to make because you were conveniently immobilized.

    That’s where I am now. My recovery means staying in my lane, so I have to admit that I will never write A Confederacy of Dunces. I don’t have the genius to write something like The Ginger Man. I won’t be crafting an autofictional masterwork à la Emmanuel Carrère’s Kingdom. What I do have is a lifetime spent crushed under the telephone pole of writing addiction, a weight that once gave my life structure—even as it kept me from actually living it.

    So, I had to be the crane operator, the paramedic, and the doctor all at once. I had to lift the damn pole, endure the pain, and figure out how to move forward. 

    Lifting the telephone pole off my ribs did indeed hurt like hell. By the time the 2024 Thanksgiving rolled around, I could feel the weight of grief like an overstuffed holiday plate. I’d said goodbye to my mother during the pandemic, standing outside a nursing home window and offering her love through a mesh screen, as if I were visiting someone in solitary confinement. Two years later, I watched my father—a proud infantryman in his day—fade to 130 pounds, his body surrendering to cancer. Since their passing, the world felt quieter, smaller, like someone had dimmed the lights without warning.

    So, when hosting Thanksgiving fell squarely on my plate, it wasn’t some Norman Rockwell fantasy. It was more like getting crushed by a baby grand piano dropped from the second floor. And instead of gracefully stepping aside, I just let it hit me—because honestly, moving felt like too much effort.

    The guest list wasn’t exactly daunting—just my perpetually single brother, whose dating apps seemed better at generating cautionary tales than romantic prospects, and two of my wife’s teacher friends, both middle school band directors still recovering from clarinet-induced PTSD. The conversation was polite, though it had all the flavor of plain oatmeal.

    Stuffed to the gills but somehow still shoveling pie like our lives depended on it, we trudged through the ritual of TV show recommendations. Each suggestion was delivered with the gravitas of a public service announcement—skip this series at your own peril. Apparently, failing to watch that one obscure, eight-part masterpiece would leave me culturally destitute, wandering through a desolate landscape devoid of punchlines and plot twists.

    Honestly, I enjoyed the company. The real villain of Thanksgiving wasn’t the guests—it was the dishes. The endless scrubbing that left my hands raw, the dishwashing marathon that stretched into eternity, the mountain of dirty plates multiplying like gremlins in the sink. That’s where the wheels came off.

    My wife, meanwhile, glided through the chaos like some kind of culinary sorceress, humming softly as she orchestrated the entire meal with the grace of a Michelin-starred maestro. She didn’t grumble. Not a single passive-aggressive sigh escaped her lips. She was the picture of serene competence.

    I, on the other hand, hovered around the kitchen like a useless NPC in a video game—occasionally moving a plate from table to sink and acting as though I’d just conquered Everest. At one point, I genuinely felt winded after rearranging the silverware. My contribution was so meager it felt performative, like a child pretending to be tired after “helping” Dad mow the lawn by pushing a plastic toy mower ten feet behind him.

    Somewhere between rinsing the roasting pan and glaring at the pile of silverware, it hit me—I was teetering on the edge of a Mope-a-saurus moment. The only thing preventing my full transformation was the vague sense of shame that my wife, who had just cooked for hours, wasn’t grumbling about the aftermath. That’s when you know you’re in trouble—when someone else’s superior competence and good cheer makes you feel like a defective appliance, sputtering through life with a flickering power cord and a weak motor.

    The lethal cocktail of self-loathing and forced sociability had drained me to the marrow. By the time the guests finally took their leave, I should have collapsed straight into bed, preferably into a coma-level sleep.

    But as a writing addict, I stayed up deep into the night and wrote a book proposal. 

    Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide

    A Memoir of Grief, Dysfunction, and the Existential Terror of Dishes

    Author: Jeff McMahon, recovering member of Write-a-holics Anonymous, part-time Manuscriptus Rex, full-time over-thinker.

    Overview:
    The holidays are supposed to be about gratitude, togetherness, and the warm glow of familial love. But let’s be honest—Thanksgiving is a psychological endurance test wrapped in a turkey-scented mirage of Norman Rockwell propaganda. You either come out of it spiritually enriched or barely clinging to sanity, drowning in a sea of gravy-stained regrets.

    This book is for those of us who, instead of basking in holiday joy, find ourselves staring into the abyss of mashed potatoes, contemplating the futility of existence while our hands prune in dishwater. It’s for the people who, somewhere between the third helping of stuffing and the forced enthusiasm over TV show recommendations, realize they are hurtling toward their final transformation: a hollow version of their former selves.

    Through dark humor, painfully relatable anecdotes, and some uncomfortably personal self-reflection, Surviving Thanksgiving: The Essential Guide will navigate the holiday’s perils—family dysfunction, grief-laden nostalgia, the crushing disappointment of dry turkey, and the passive-aggressive Olympics that inevitably break out over pie. Along the way, I’ll explore the psychology of holiday meltdowns, the delusions of tradition, and why washing dishes can trigger a full existential crisis.

    Target Audience:
    This book is for:

    • Burnt-out hosts who wonder why they agreed to this in the first place.
    • Perpetually single siblings trapped in the “Any Special Someone?” interrogation.
    • Grief-stricken folks realizing the empty chairs at the table hurt more than expected.
    • Introverts who barely survived the social gauntlet.
    • Writing addicts who turn all their misery into book proposals.

    Tone & Style:
    Think David Sedaris meets Kitchen Confidential with a side of A Confederacy of Dunces. It’s part memoir, part cultural critique, and entirely fueled by existential dread and too much pie.

    Managing my anxieties over Thanksgiving, I had conceived a preposterous memoir, a premise clearly more suitable for an essay than a book, but I couldn’t help it. Conceiving of these “comic memoirs” and providing a book proposal was a compulsion. Stopping one addiction didn’t make my compulsions disappear. They simply rerouted, popping up in new, mutated forms, like a literary game of whack-a-mole.

    Now, instead of writing doomed novels, I found myself obsessing over my own struggles, crafting fractured hero tales where I was the comic fool, perpetually failing forward, stumbling through existence like a man who just had a telephone pole yanked off his chest—and is still waiting for his ribs to stop throbbing.

  • If you want to lose all your friends, write a memoir

    If you want to lose all your friends, write a memoir

    Things didn’t get off to a great start with Meredith Maran’s Why We Write About Ourselves, a collection of essays on memoir writing. She kicks things off with a dire warning: if you want to lose your friends and nuke your marriage, just go ahead and write a memoir. I had been hoping for a beacon to guide me out of my existential writing crisis and into the Promised Land, but instead, I found myself in a flashing red-light district of Proceed at Your Own Peril.

    Maran dives deep into the murky waters of writerly motivation and resurfaces with the least flattering answer possible: we’re all a bunch of nosy, voyeuristic gossip hounds who want the dirt—preferably dished out in the raw, unfiltered voice of the first-person narrator. It reminds me of Truman Capote’s observation that all literature is just well-dressed gossip, and in the world of memoir, it seems the clothes are optional.

    With the motivations for reading memoirs sufficiently dragged into the light, Maran turns to the reasons people write them. She notes that some see the memoir as nothing more than a narcissistic circus—a playing field where “attention-craving, sensationalistic, crass, and craven” egomaniacs head-butt and navel-gaze their way onto the bestseller list. It’s a bleak portrait, and one that left me momentarily concerned that I, too, might just be another sideshow act in this literary funhouse.

    Fortunately, the writers in Maran’s book offer more redeeming perspectives. Not everyone approaches memoir as a vehicle for public self-adoration or a passive-aggressive airing of grievances. Some actually—brace yourself—write for reasons that are noble, even sympathetic.

    Ayelet Waldman, for instance, delivers a reality check: a memoir cannot simply be a glorified diary, a raw and unfiltered regurgitation of emotions. It must be processed—shaped by craft, analysis, and a clear point of view. In other words, if your memoir reads like the fevered pages of a high school journal, you’re doing it wrong. Writing may be therapeutic, but unless it’s been refined into something resembling art, it has no business being read by anyone who isn’t legally obligated to love you.

    As I devoured the memoirists’ writing advice, one truth became undeniable: The elements that make a great memoir are the same ones that make a great novel—world-building, fearless truth-telling, a well-defined character arc, an engaging narrative, a distinct point of view, and above all, a damn good story.

    But memoir comes with a steeper price. In fiction, a character’s deepest secrets are spilled without hesitation—because, after all, they’re not real. A memoir, however, deals in cold, hard reality, which means that privacy is collateral damage. That’s the rub of memoir: The death of discretion. In a world where people already complain about “too much sharing,” a memoirist must trample that boundary without apology. No holds barred, no skeletons left in the closet.

    So why not just slap a fictional label on it and dodge the ethical landmines? Why not camouflage the truth in a novel and spare yourself (and others) the public exposure? Sometimes, that’s the smarter move. But not always.

    There’s a reason we say, “You can’t make this stuff up.” Some real-life events have an organic absurdity, a cosmic cruelty, or an accidental genius that fiction could never replicate. In some cases, stranger than fiction isn’t just a phrase—it’s a mandate. If a story loses its raw power by being fictionalized, then you have no choice but to write it as it happened, bruises and all.

    Then things get even messier. What happens when you dress a memoir in fictional clothing—using an unreliable narrator, injecting autobiographical flourishes, blending novelistic techniques into something that isn’t quite memoir, isn’t quite novel, but floats in that murky realm of autofiction?

    I considered all of this and still chose memoir. Because for me, writing about a young man whose life was warped, reshaped, and essentially hijacked by comic novels—especially A Confederacy of Dunces—wasn’t just an artistic decision. It was the spine of my existence. It wasn’t just about paying the bills, meeting obligations, or navigating life’s banal logistics. It was about inhabiting two parallel universes at once, toggling between reality and the kind of aspiring literary dream world Steely Dan’s melancholy narrator longs for as a musician in “Deacon Blues.”

    Because for some of us, living in two worlds is the only way to manage ourselves.

  • It’s impossible to overestimate Hugh Hefner’s Influence on 70s Culture

    It’s impossible to overestimate Hugh Hefner’s Influence on 70s Culture

    Mario Vargas Llosa opens his memoir about Flaubert’s masterpiece Madame Bovary with a startling confession: fictional characters have shaped his life more than real people. And among these literary phantoms, none has haunted him like Emma Bovary.

    He first encountered her as a broke student in Paris in 1959, reading Madame Bovary in his cramped, dimly lit apartment, where the novel consumed him like a “magic spell.” This wasn’t just a passing literary crush—Flaubert’s novel hardwired his taste in fiction. Llosa craves symmetry, structure, and bold architecture—stories that begin, unfold, and close like a perfectly executed aria, not those meandering, open-ended narratives that wander aimlessly like a lost tourist in a foreign city. He wants novels that sum up an entire existence, not ones that leave you guessing where the rest of the pages went.

    But his obsession with Madame Bovary isn’t just about its structural perfection. Llosa delights in its savage portrayal of stupidity, hypocrisy, cowardice, and self-complacent mediocrity. He sees Emma Bovary as a tragic hero, a woman who refuses to rot inside the coffin of bourgeois chastity, instead reaching for sensuality, opulence, and a life less suffocating. She fails, of course—spectacularly—but Llosa admires the rebellion even as he watches it collapse.

    His connection to Madame Bovary runs deeper than admiration. He sees himself in Emma. He shares her “stubborn despair, a profound distaste for life,” and her reckless excesses as an emotional counterattack against a cruel, indifferent world. Reading about Emma’s slow, agonizing suicide didn’t just illuminate the novel’s merciless social critique—it gave Llosa a new understanding of his own misery. In that sense, the book wasn’t just a masterpiece—it was a form of catharsis, a lifeboat thrown to him in turbulent waters.

    I recognize this kind of literary possession all too well. I had my own Madame Bovary moment—except it came in the form of A Confederacy of Dunces. When I read it, I saw the excesses of a young man crushed by his own emotional impoverishment, who built a fortress of grandiosity to shield himself from reality. Like Llosa with Emma, I saw a grotesque reflection of my own worst instincts. And, like him, I couldn’t look away.

    Recognizing the worst instincts in others—and in myself—was the fuel behind my ill-fated quest to be a comic novelist, a misadventure that, sadly, yielded nothing but abandoned drafts and existential nausea.

    Still, like Llosa, I found a perverse kind of clarity in my compulsion to chronicle human excess—a knack for spotting the gaudy, the grotesque, and the tragically misguided, then trapping it on the page like a butterfly pinned to a display case.

    If nothing else, I could always recognize an Emma Bovary type—vulgar, kitschy, overdosing on fantasies of grandeur—and I knew how to turn their delusions into cautionary tales, even if my own delusions proved immune to the lesson.

    I’m thinking of Playboy media magnate Hugh Hefner who fancied himself a rebel against bourgeois prudishness. Hugh Hefner, the prophet of smarmy male entitlement and silk-robe swagger. Hefner preached a gospel of unrepentant pleasure-seeking and Playboy-approved cosplay, designed to hypnotize women and soothe fragile male egos.

    And in the sweltering summer of 1977, I met one of Hefner’s most devout disciples: Glenn Leidecker.

    Every Saturday that summer, I practically melted into the scorched earth at Cull Canyon Lake, basted in Hawaiian Tropic Dark Tanning Oil—SPF Zero, because back then skin cancer was just a rumor. The sticky perfume of coconut and bananas was the scent of youth and poor decisions.

    Then there was Leidecker.

    Late twenties. Wavy brown hair, feathered to perfection. A thick, manicured mustache that could have been insured for thousands. An even, leathery tan stretched over a frame wearing nothing but blue Speedo briefs, a gold chain, and a white puka shell necklace draped over his hairy chest. His arsenal of seduction included a white Frisbee, a Playboy-logo cooler, and a boombox blasting the smooth seduction of Foreigner, Fleetwood Mac, and K.C. and The Sunshine Band.

    His moves were choreographed to the point of absurdity. Every Saturday, Leidecker ran the same pickup script on an endless rotation of bikini-clad women. I knew every line by heart: the $500 custom paint job on his Camaro, the humblebrag about his dad’s Bay Area clothing stores, the claim that he’d been managing those stores since high school, and the cherry on top—he was this close to landing a role in a Hollywood martial arts movie. Oh, and let’s not forget the constant invocation of “Parsons Estates,” which he dropped like it was some enchanted kingdom instead of a generic middle-class neighborhood.

    Leidecker wasn’t just a cliché. He was a valedictorian of Smarmy Male University, graduating magna cum laude in Playboy Posturing. His thesis? A cover-to-cover study of Eric Weber’s How to Pick Up Girls!, a sleazy manifesto that encouraged men to relentlessly harass women under the delusion that persistence equals success.

    Week after week, Leidecker reeled in a fresh catch, tossing Frisbees on the grassy knoll with women who didn’t yet realize they were extras in his sad little production. He wasn’t a man; he was a walking Playboy advertisement, the answer to that smug caption, “What sort of man reads Playboy?” Apparently, the kind of man who thinks speedos and gold chains are a mating call.

    I watched the mating ritual from my towel, pretending to read my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker while keeping a close eye on Leidecker. He was mid-Frisbee toss with two blonde girls in matching white bikinis when he let out an alarming, almost comical howl.

    “Oh my God, you stepped on a bee!” one of the girls gasped.

    Sure enough, the poor insect spun helplessly in the grass, stinger spent. But it was Leidecker who was spiraling. Sweat beaded on his bronzed skin, his Playboy cool starting to crack.

    But of course, he couldn’t just admit he was in agony. The kind of man who reads Playboy doesn’t crumble over a bee sting.

    “No big deal,” he puffed, wobbling on his rapidly swelling foot. “Just a little bee sting.”

    By now, his foot had ballooned into something resembling a Christmas ham, and a shiny coat of sweat slicked his once-confident swagger. Still, he insisted, “I’m fine. Really. Let’s keep playing.”

    Because the kind of man who reads Playboy is a warrior. He doesn’t show weakness. He doesn’t feel weakness.

    Until he did.

    Leidecker’s tough-guy act evaporated in an instant. His eyes bulged with panic, his breath turned ragged, and then—like a poorly written action hero meeting his karmic comeuppance—he crumpled to the ground, hyperventilating into anaphylactic shock.

    Did he survive? No idea. But if this were fiction, he’d be stone-cold dead—a sacrificial lamb on the altar of poetic justice: Death by vanity, wrapped up with a neat moral bow. 

    Like Llosa, I’ve always gravitated toward narratives with crisp, decisive endings—no ambiguity, no loose threads, no “life just goes on” cop-outs. I crave stories with bold structures and brutal symmetry, because, deep down, I need them. I need fables, cautionary tales, and tragic blueprints to ward off the self-destructive instincts swirling inside me. If life refuses to provide a clean conclusion, then dammit, fiction will.

  • Mr. Peabody Was My Role Model

    Mr. Peabody Was My Role Model

    In my early teens in the 1970s, I toured the waterbed revolution like a true believer. Friends, neighbors—everyone seemed to have one, and after test-driving these vinyl oceans, I became convinced that a waterbed would deliver me into a life of unimaginable luxury, decadent pleasure, and deep, undisturbed sleep. Reality had other plans.

    I badgered my parents into buying me one, fully expecting a nirvana of relaxation. Instead, I got a glorified swamp. The temperature was either scalding lava or Arctic frost, the thin vinyl leaked like a punctured raft, and the whole thing smelled like a frog orgy in a Louisiana bayou. Worse, any movement triggered an equal and opposite reaction, as if I were engaged in battle with some unseen aquatic force.

    The final insult? A biblical flood. One morning, my leaking disaster destroyed the floorboards, turning my bedroom into a post-hurricane FEMA zone. My dreams of floating into the future of sleep innovation had instead capsized, and I was left with the cold, hard truth: the quest for the ultimate bed would have to begin anew.

    Of course, I couldn’t let this tragedy go undocumented. Some people move on—I, on the other hand, have a compulsion to turn every misadventure into a cautionary tale.

    I blame my childhood TV habits. I was obsessed with The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, particularly the history lessons from Mr. Peabody and Sherman. With their time-traveling escapades, they examined history through Mr. Peabody’s smug brilliance, making sense of human folly. I can picture them now, entering their time machine, visiting me as my waterbed catastrophe unfolds, and filing the entire debacle under “Lessons in Bad Decision-Making.”

    For me, this is what writing is—a time machine, a way to travel through memory, make sense of chaos, and leave behind an indelible mark. It’s a compulsion, an illness, a disease.

    Trying to understand this affliction, I turned to Anne Lamott for rehabilitation. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life is mercifully free of false hope. A veteran of countless writing workshops, Lamott tells her students the truth: writing will not bring peace, joy, or serenity. Instead, their lives will be a mess—ruin, hysteria, bad skin, unsightly tics, financial catastrophe—but not peace of mind.

    And yet, she urges them to embrace the suffering, because to suffer for writing is a privilege—a sign that they have “finally arrived.”

    Translation: Writing isn’t a craft. It’s a storm you never escape from, a bad investment you refuse to cut loose, a waterbed that just won’t stop leaking—but you keep lying on it anyway.

    To take up writing is to choose obsession—to engage with ideas, people, and the world with an intensity otherwise unattainable. The alternative? A life of flatline existence, tranquilized and convalescent, a kind of slow-motion death. Writing is a self-inflicted challenge, a constant state of creative warfare, but that’s the point. You’ve chosen a mission as high-stakes as Vikings raiding distant shores because you’re not content to sedate yourself with the comfort of a reliable, unchallenging routine. 

    Yes, you can walk away, consume food, entertainment, and dopamine-rich distractions, and let your mind dissolve into cultural sludge. But the price of that escape is worse than the struggle—an existence marked by vapidity, emptiness, and a soul-draining sense of futility.

    I was reminded of this during a conversation with a Trader Joe’s cashier about her twenty-four-year-old daughter. At nineteen, the girl dropped out of college during COVID and never returned. Now she works at a dispensary, detached and listless, selling products to customers just as zoned out as she is. A perfect circle of disengagement.

    Writing is the opposite: an act of defiance against entropy—a way to make discoveries, clarify the chaos, and refine that clarity into a persona and a voice that matters. Once you get a taste of this life, there is no going back.

    Lamott puts it best: writing is like milking a cow—”the milk is so rich and delicious, and the cow is so glad you did it.” Her goal is not just to teach writing but to make sure that once you’ve milked the cow, you’ll never want to stop.

    I never wanted to stop. Writing isn’t the problem—staying in my lane is.

    I don’t want to burden my wife, friends, or unsuspecting literary agents with yet another unreadable novel, churned out from a delusional obsession, an addiction, a brain warp induced by too many readings of A Confederacy of Dunces. Some might say I should write for therapy, keep a journal for mental hygiene, treating my office like a literary spa where I purge the toxins from my overactive brain.

    That’s not how I operate.

    Writing only feels real if I imagine other people reading it. To write only for myself feels repulsive, deranged—what philosophers call solipsism, where the self becomes the only reality. If I’m the only audience, then I might as well be shouting into a void, a lunatic locked in a room, talking to no one but his own reflection.

    And yet, there’s something almost hopeful in my need for an audience. Strip away the ego factor, and what remains is connection—the belief that words should travel, that they should land inside someone else’s head and stir something awake. For all my curmudgeonly tendencies, I’m no misanthrope. In my darkest moments, I still believe that deep human connections—through writing, music, and art—prove that we haven’t entirely given up on each other.

    I think of George Carlin, who, for all his nihilistic rants, never hid in a cave. He famously said that being born is like getting a front-row ticket to the freak show—but instead of watching in silence, he grabbed a mic and talked about it for hours.

    I can’t write for no one. The thrill of writing is imagining that someone, somewhere, is reading.

    Last night, I listened to Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony on the radio, and it felt electric. Had I streamed it alone, the experience would have been diminished—background noise rather than something shared. Knowing that thousands of others were listening at the same moment made the music more alive, more urgent.

    I can’t tell if this compulsion to share my stories is a normal human impulse or the delusion of a narcissist. I want people to know about my misadventures, my catastrophes, my brief flirtations with transcendence. I want people to see history the way I saw it, the way I lived it. I believe in marking things down for posterity, but I also suspect that if I don’t immortalize my past in print, it might evaporate into the void like it never happened at all.

    Lurking beneath all this is a deeper fear—that something essential to our humanity is slipping away. So I climb into Mr. Peabody’s time machine and set the dial to the summers of 1975 through 1979, when my family and a small army of friends made the annual pilgrimage to Pt. Reyes Beach. Johnson’s Oyster Farm was our temple, and its truck beds overflowed with what seemed like an infinite supply of oysters. From noon to sunset, we ate like gods in exile—barbecued oysters drowning in garlic butter and Tabasco, bottomless baskets of garlic bread, and colossal slabs of moist chocolate cake.

    Ignoring the ominous great white shark warnings, we punctuated our feasting with reckless dives into the waves, emerging from the ocean with our pecs glistening in the sunlight, ready for another round of oysters. In the summer of ’78, I decided not to ride home with my parents. Instead, I hitched a ride in the back of a stranger’s truck, surrounded by a ragtag group of new acquaintances—full-bellied, sun-dazed, and staring up at the stars with our glazed lizard eyes, swapping wild stories like ancient mariners.

    And here’s the thing: nobody took a single picture. There were no selfies, no curated posts to induce FOMO, no frantic attempts to manufacture nostalgia in real time. We were too deep inside the moment to think about how it might look on a screen later. Today, we don’t experience moments—we package them for consumption.

    And maybe that’s why I can’t not write about it. I can’t store my stories in some damp, echoing cave, streaming them to an audience of one. I need them broadcasted, carried on the airwaves, felt in real time by others.

    My disease is incurable.

  • The danger of misunderstanding Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues”

    The danger of misunderstanding Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues”

    Reading Why We Write and seeing the world’s elite authors dissect the process that made them flourish forced me to confront a brutal truth: I am not a real writer.

    All those decades of grinding out abysmal, unreadable novels weren’t acts of literary craftsmanship—they were performance art, a cosplay so convincing that even I fell for it. I played the role of “the unappreciated novelist” with such dazzling commitment that I actually believed it. And what was my proof of authenticity? Misery and failure.

    Surely, I thought, only a true genius could endure decades of rejection, obscurity, and artistic suffering. Surely, my inability to produce a good novel was simply a sign that I was ahead of my time, too profound for this crass and unworthy world.

    Turns out, I wasn’t an undiscovered genius—I was just really, really bad at writing novels.

    Misery is a tricky con artist. It convinces you that suffering is the price of authenticity, that the deeper your despair, the more profound your genius. This is especially true for the unpublished writer, that tragic figure who has transformed rejection into a sacred ritual. He doesn’t just endure misery—he cultivates it, polishes it, wears it like a bespoke suit of existential agony. In his mind, every unopened response from a literary agent is further proof of his artistic martyrdom. He mistakes his failure for proof that he is part of some elite, misunderstood brotherhood, the kind of tortured souls who scowl in coffee shops and rage against the mediocrity of the world.

    And therein lies the grand delusion: the belief that suffering is a substitute for talent, that rejection letters are secret messages from the universe confirming his genius. This is not art—it’s literary cosplay, complete with the requisite brooding and self-pity. The unpublished writer isn’t just chasing publication; he’s chasing the idea of being the tortured artist, as if melancholy alone could craft a masterpiece. 

    Which brings us to the next guiding principle for Manuscriptus Rex’s rehabilitation: 

    The belief that the more miserable you are, the more authentic you become. This dangerous belief has its origins in a popular song–none other than Steely Dan’s brooding anthem, “Deacon Blues.”

    Like any good disciple, I’ve worshiped at this altar without even realizing it. I, too, have believed I’m the “expanding man”—growing wiser, deeper, more profound—while simultaneously wallowing in self-pity as a misunderstood loser. It’s a special kind of delusion, the spiritual equivalent of polishing a rusty trophy.

    To fully grasp this faith, I point you to The Wall Street Journal article, “How Steely Dan Created ‘Deacon Blues’” by Marc Myers. There, Donald Fagen and Walter Becker peel back the curtain on the song’s narrator—a man who could’ve just as easily been named Sad Sack Jones. He’s a suburban daydreamer, stuck in a dull, mediocre life, fantasizing that he’s a hard-drinking, sax-blowing rebel with women at his feet.

    Fagen admits the character was designed as a counterpoint to the unstoppable juggernaut of college football’s Crimson Tide—a gleaming machine of winners. In contrast, Deacon Blues is the anthem of the losers, crafted from a Malibu piano room with a sliver of Pacific Ocean peeking through the houses. Becker summed it up best: “Crimson Tide” dripped with grandiosity, so they invented “Deacon Blues” to glorify failure.

    And did it work. “Deacon Blues” became the unofficial patron saint for every self-proclaimed misfit who saw their own authenticity in his despair. He was our tragic hero—uncompromising, self-actualized, and romantic in his suffering.

    But then I read the article, and the spell broke. We were all suckered by a myth. Like the song’s narrator, we swallowed the fantasy of the “expanding man,” not realizing he was a con artist in his own mind. This isn’t a noble figure battling the world’s indifference—it’s a man marinating in his own mediocrity, dressed up in fantasies of scotch, saxophones, and self-destructive glamour.

    Walter Becker wasn’t subtle: the protagonist in “Deacon Blues” is a triple-L loser—an L-L-L Loser. Not a man on the cusp of greatness, but a man clutching a broken dream, pacing through a broken life. Fagen sharpened the knife: this is the guy who wakes up at 31 in his parents’ house and decides he’s suddenly going to “strut his stuff.”

    That sad, self-deluded basement dweller? That was the false prophet I’d built my personal religion around. A faith propped up by fantasies and self-sabotage.

    The man who inspired me wasn’t a misunderstood genius. He was a cautionary tale. A false path paved with jazz, liquor, and the comforting hum of failure.

    The slacker man-child isn’t just a tragic figure crooning in Steely Dan’s “Deacon Blues.” No, he walks among us—lounges among us, really—and I knew one personally. His name was Michael Barley.

    We met in the late 1980s at my apartment swimming pool while I was teaching college writing in Bakersfield, a place that practically invents new ways to suffocate ambition. A failed musician who had dabbled in a couple of garage bands, Michael was in his early thirties and bore such a stunning resemblance to Paul McCartney that he could’ve landed a cushy gig as a Vegas impersonator if only ambition hadn’t been a foreign concept to him. He had it all: the same nose, the same mouth, the same melancholy eyes, even the same feathered, shoulder-grazing hair McCartney rocked in the ’70s and ’80s. Sure, he was shorter, stockier, and his cheeks were pockmarked with acne scars, but from a distance—and, really, only from a distance—he was Paul’s sad-sack doppelgänger.

    Michael leaned into this resemblance like a man squeezing the last drops from a dry sponge. At clubs, he’d loiter near the bar in a black blazer—his self-anointed “Beatles jacket”—wearing a slack-jawed half-smile, waiting for some starry-eyed woman to break the ice with, “Has anyone ever told you…?” His pickup strategy was less a plan and more a form of passive income. The women did all the work; he just had to stand there and exist. The hardest part of the night, I suspect, was pretending to be surprised when they made the McCartney connection for the hundredth time.

    And then he disappeared. For six months, nothing.

    When Michael resurfaced, he wasn’t Michael anymore. He was Julian French—an “English musician” with a secondhand accent and thirdhand dreams. He had fled to London, apparently thinking the UK was clamoring for chubby McCartney clones, and when that didn’t pan out (shocking, I know), he slunk back to Bakersfield to live in his parents’ trailer, which, in a tragicomic twist, was attached to an elementary school where his father worked as the janitor and moonlit as a locksmith.

    But Michael—excuse me, Julian—was undeterred. He insisted I call him by his new British name, swore up and down that his accent was authentic, and we returned to our old haunts. Now, at the gym and in nightclubs, I watched him work the crowd with his faux-charm and faux-accent, slinging cars and cell phones like a man with no Plan B. His Beatles face was his business card, his only sales pitch. He lived off the oxygen of strangers’ admiration, basking in the glow of almost being someone important.

    But here’s the truth: Michael—Julian—wasn’t hustling. He was coasting. His whole life was one long, lazy drift powered by the barest effort. He never married, never had a long-term relationship, never even pretended to have ambition. His greatest challenge was feigning humility when people gushed over his discount McCartney face.

    Time, of course, is undefeated. By middle age, Julian’s face began to betray him. His ears and nose ballooned, his jowls sagged, and the resemblance to Paul McCartney evaporated. Without his one-note gimmick, the magic died. The women, the friends, the sales—they all disappeared. So, back to the trailer he went, tail tucked, learning the locksmith trade from his father, as if turning keys could unlock the door to whatever life he’d wasted.

    And me? I didn’t judge him. I couldn’t.

    Because deep down, I knew I was just as susceptible to the same delusion—the myth of the “Expanding Man.” That romantic fantasy of being a misunderstood artist, swaddled in self-pity, wandering through life with the illusion of authenticity. Like the anti-hero in “Deacon Blues,” Julian wasn’t building a life; he was building a narrative to justify his stagnation.

    And wasn’t I doing the same? By the late ’90s, I was approaching 40, professionally afloat but personally shipwrecked—emotionally underdeveloped, the cracks in my personality widening into canyons. I, too, was toeing that fine line between winner and loser, haunted by the possibility that I’d wasted years buying into the same seductive lie that trapped Julian.

    That’s the genius of the “Deacon Blue’s” Doctrine—a religion as potent as opium. It sanctifies self-pity, addiction, and delusions of grandeur, repackaging them into a noble code of suffering. It convinces you that stewing in your own misery is a virtue, that being a failure makes you authentic, and that the world just isn’t sophisticated enough to appreciate your “depth.”

    But here’s the truth no one tells you: eventually, life hands you your ass on a stick. That’s when you find out which side of the line you’re really on.

  • “I am not a novelist. I am a caveman.”

    “I am not a novelist. I am a caveman.”

    I am not a novelist. I am a caveman, a storyteller hunched by the fire, gesturing wildly, my face contorting into grotesque expressions as I spin cautionary tales. My stories warn the tribe of those who lost themselves—souls swallowed by obsessions, passions twisted beyond recognition. I feed off their reaction, stretching the truth, inflating reality with hyperbole to keep their eyes locked on me.

    This caveman energy has defined my forty years of teaching college writing. The classroom’s laughter and gasps convinced me I had the chops to be a comic novelist, but I failed to see the obvious: a twenty-minute monologue is not War and Peace. And yet, I clung to the fantasy of being a novelist-in-waiting, a delusion that only crumbled when I finally took stock of my work.

    What did I find? No One Hundred Years of Solitude, no grand literary masterpiece. Instead, I had a collection of vignettes, sharp, compact, brimming with cautionary tales of the fallen, the delusional, the broken—people lost in fever dreams from which they could not escape. I obsessed over them because they were me—walking, talking omens of my own unraveling, flashing neon signs warning me to correct course before it was too late.

    For years, I mistook my ability to capture madness with clarity and drama as proof I was meant to write novels. But the truth? I was never built for the big circus tent of the novel. My writing came in violent bursts—a torrential downpour of inspiration followed by silence. A flash flood, wreaking havoc for one glorious moment before I moved on to another city, another storm.

    As part of my rehabilitation, I had to accept my nature, not fight it. I had to catalog my flash floods, embrace the writing I was actually designed for, and banish the novelist delusion once and for all. I needed a name that reflected my true form—something fitting for a writer who thrives in short, explosive bursts.

    I had to become Maxwell Shortform, a proud subspecies of Manuscriptus Rex.

    As Maxwell Shortform, I am capable of presenting a ghost story masquerading as regret. Not the cheap, chain-rattling kind of ghost story, but the deeper, more insidious variety—the kind where the specters aren’t dead, just eternally trapped in the past, doomed to replay their moment of ruin over and over like a broken film reel. Regret, after all, is the cruelest kind of haunting. It doesn’t just linger in the shadows; it moves in, redecorates, and turns your soul into its permanent residence. Regret doesn’t just trap people in the past—it embalms them in it, like a fly in amber, forever twitching with regret. As Maxwell Shortform, I have been able to capture the fate of three men I know who, decades later, are still gnashing their teeth over a squandered romantic encounter so catastrophic in their minds, it may as well be their personal Waterloo.

    It was the summer of their senior year, a time when testosterone and bad decisions flowed freely. Driving from Bakersfield to Los Angeles for a Dodgers game, they were winding through the Grapevine when fate, wearing a tie-dye bikini, waved them down. On the side of the road, an overheated vintage Volkswagen van—a sunbaked shade of decayed orange—coughed its last breath. Standing next to it? Four radiant, sun-kissed Grateful Dead followers, fresh from a concert and still floating on a psychedelic afterglow.

    These weren’t just women. These were ethereal, free-spirited nymphs, perfumed in the intoxicating mix of patchouli, wild musk, and possibility. Their laughter tinkled like wind chimes in an ocean breeze, their sun-bronzed shoulders glistening as they waved their bikinis and spaghetti-strap tops in the air like celestial signals guiding sailors to shore.

    My friends, handy with an engine but fatally clueless in the ways of the universe, leaped to action. With grease-stained heroism, they nursed the van back to health, coaxing it into a purring submission. Their reward? An invitation to abandon their pedestrian baseball game and join the Deadhead goddesses at the Santa Barbara Summer Solstice Festival—an offer so dripping with hedonistic promise that even a monk would’ve paused to consider.

    But my friends? Naïve. Stupid. Shackled to their Dodgers tickets as if they were golden keys to Valhalla. With profuse thanks (and, one imagines, the self-awareness of a plank of wood), they declined. They drove off, leaving behind the road-worn sirens who, even now, are probably still dancing barefoot somewhere, oblivious to the tragedy they unwittingly inflicted.

    Decades later, my friends can’t recall a single play from that Dodgers game, but they can describe—down to the last bead of sweat—the precise moment they drove away from paradise. Bring it up, and they revert into snarling, feral beasts, snapping at each other over whose fault it was that they abandoned the best opportunity of their pathetic young lives. Their girlfriends, beautiful and present, might as well be holograms. After all, these men are still spiritually chained to that sun-scorched highway, watching the tie-dye bikini tops flutter in the wind like banners of a lost kingdom.

    Insomnia haunts them. Their nights are riddled with fever dreams of sun-drenched bacchanals that never happened. They wake in cold sweats, whispering the names of women they never actually kissed. Their relationships suffer, their souls remain malnourished, and all because, on that fateful day, they chose baseball over Dionysian bliss.

    Regret couldn’t have orchestrated a better long-term psychological prison if it tried. It’s been forty years, but they still can’t forgive themselves. They never will. And in their minds, somewhere on that dusty stretch of highway, a rusted-out orange van still sits, idling in the sun, filled with the ghosts of what could have been.

    Humans have always craved stories of folly, and for good reason. First, there’s the guilty pleasure of witnessing someone else’s spectacular downfall—our inner schadenfreude finds comfort in knowing it wasn’t us who tumbled into the abyss of human madness. Second, these stories hold up a mirror to our own vulnerability, reminding us that we’re all just one bad decision away from disaster.

    Finally, this tale of missed hedonism, of men forever ensnared in the amber of their own foolishness, is biblical writing in its purest form. Not because it involves scripture or saints, but because it operates on a grand, mythic scale. Here, regret isn’t just an emotion—it’s a cosmic punishment, an exile from paradise so severe it echoes through decades. Like Lot’s wife turning to salt, these men made the fatal error of looking back too late, realizing only in hindsight that they had forsaken a divine gift. Their sorrow is eternal, their torment unrelenting. Even now, they wander through the wasteland of their own remorse, spiritually marooned on that sun-scorched highway, the spectral van idling in their subconscious like a rusted-out relic of their squandered youth. 

    There is no novel here, no book deal, no confetti raining down in celebration. No literary parade in my honor, no breathless NPR interview, not even a sad little short story to be mumbled at a hipster café over oat-milk lattes.

    As Maxwell Shortform, I drift above the world like storm clouds, unleash a torrential downpour of words, and then vanish before anyone can open an umbrella. That is my fate. And accepting my fate is a vital stage of my rehabilitation—learning to embrace the flash flood over the slow, steady river, the brilliant spark over the eternal flame.

  • Joan Didion Was Correct: Writing Is an Aggressive Act

    Joan Didion Was Correct: Writing Is an Aggressive Act

    In my quest to diagnose the writing demon that refuses to release me from its grip, I turned to Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do, edited by Meredith Maran. In her introduction, Maran paints a bleak portrait of the literary life: writers waking before dawn, shackling themselves to their craft with grim determination, all while the odds of success hover somewhere between laughable and nonexistent.

    She lays out the statistics like a funeral director preparing the bereaved: out of a million manuscripts, only 1% will find a home. And if that doesn’t crush your soul, she follows up with another gut punch: only 30% of published books turn a profit. Clearly, materialism isn’t the primary motivator here. Perhaps masochism plays a role—some deep-seated desire for rejection that outstrips the mere thrill of self-rejection. Or maybe it’s just pathology, an exorcism waiting to happen.

    For those unwilling to embrace despair, Maran brings in George Orwell’s “four great motives for writing”: egotism, the pleasures of good prose, the need for historical clarity, and the urge to make a political argument. Sensible enough. No surprises.

    Where things get interesting is Joan Didion’s take. Didion, never one for sentimentality, strips the writer’s motives bare: “In many ways writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even hostile act.”

    Reading that, my eyes lit up with recognition. Didion had just sketched Manuscriptus Rex in perfect detail—the secret bully, the compulsive brain-hijacker who isn’t content to write in solitude but needs to occupy the minds of others, to install his worldview in their most private spaces.

    Terry Tempest Williams, on the other hand, writes to confront her ghosts, a sentiment that deeply appeals to me. The idea of the writer as a haunted creature, forever pursued by stories that demand exorcism, feels not only true but inescapable.

    But here’s the kicker—Maran makes it clear that the twenty writers in her book aren’t failures like me. They’re not Manuscriptus Rexes, howling into the void. No, they are the anointed ones, welcomed by publishers with open arms, bathed in the golden light of editorial gratitude.

    And yet, they didn’t land on Mount Olympus by accident. They fought. They clawed their way up, word by painful word, which means they have something to teach—not just to their fans but to me, a self-aware Manuscriptus Rex still trying to understand what, exactly, makes him tick.

    There is no shortage of delicious tidbits in Why We Write. Isabel Allende talks about the necessity of writing like a growing tumor that has to be dealt with or will simply grow out of control. She adds that even if she begins with a germ of an idea, the book has a life of its own. It grows from her unconscious obsessions and preoccupations, so that in the beginning she has not yet discovered what story she is going to tell. Also, she is a writer of ritual and routine. Every January seventh is the day before she starts writing a new book. She gathers all her materials in her “little pool house,” which she uses as her office. It is her sacred space to work, just “seventeen steps” from her home. 

    The idea of having two separate spaces—one for writing, one for everything else—fascinates me. It reminds me of something Martin Amis once told Charlie Rose: he needed to be a writer because toggling between the world of the novel and the earthly world created a kind of necessary duality, a parallel existence where imagination could thrive. For someone wired for storytelling, living between those two realities wasn’t just a luxury—it was a survival mechanism.

    At home, Isabel Allende straddles two universes, one sacred, the other profane. And it calls to mind the lesson my college fiction professor, N.V.M. Gonzalez, drilled into us: a fiction writer must know the difference between sacred and profane time.

    A great writer conducts these two temporal forces like an orchestra. Sacred time—mythic, timeless, symbolic—stretches beyond the clock, charging pivotal moments with fate, destiny, and the weight of history. It’s the crossroads where a single decision echoes through eternity. Profane time, by contrast, is the ticking metronome of daily existence—the coffee that goes cold, the unpaid bills, the search for a parking spot.

    A great novel moves between the two—one moment steeped in cosmic significance, the next trapped in the drudgery of real life. A character might wrestle with divine purpose—but that won’t stop their Wi-Fi from cutting out mid-revelation.

    Allende enters her writing enclave in a state of terror and exhilaration, grappling with ideas—some brilliant, some best left in the trash bin—while navigating stress, disappointment, and suspense. Her process feels high-stakes, and really, what is life without high stakes? A slow, numbing descent into low expectations, inertia, and existential boredom—a fate worse than failure.

    Maybe writing addiction is just the relentless drive to keep the stakes high. Without it, life shrinks into a provisional existence, where survival boils down to the next meal, the next fleeting pleasure, the next song that momentarily sends a tingle up your spine—a desperate Morse code from the universe to confirm you’re still alive.

    The writers in this book all share the same unshakable compulsion to write. For them, writing isn’t just a craft; it’s therapy, oxygen, a way to make sense of chaos. They write because they can’t not write—because failure to do so would send them spiraling into an existential crisis too dark to contemplate. Writing gives them self-worth, wards off insanity, and serves as the only acceptable coping mechanism for their undying curiosities. It isn’t a choice—it’s a chronic condition.

    These successful authors write relentlessly, enduring the agony of writer’s block, self-loathing, and the horror of their own bad prose, all while clawing their way toward something better. And while I share their compulsions, I lack their stamina and focus. Reading about Isabel Allende’s fourteen-hour writing binges was my moment of clarity: I am not a literary gladiator. These novelists can paint vast landscapes of story without crapping out halfway. I, on the other hand, am a wind-sprinter—a lunatic exploding off the starting block, only to collapse in a gasping heap a hundred yards later, curl into the fetal position, and slip into a creative coma.

    And this, I suspect, is the great torment of Manuscriptus Rex—an insatiable hunger to write the big book, clashing violently with a temperament built for sprints, not marathons. This misalignment fuels much of my artistic misery, my chronic dissatisfaction, and my ever-expanding graveyard of unfinished masterpieces.

    Still, whatever envy and despair I felt reading about these elite warriors of the written word, this book offered a cure—I will never again attempt a novel unless divine intervention forces my hand. I’ve seen too many of my failed attempts, the work of a man pretending to be a novelist rather than one willing to endure the necessary rigor. But I do have another calling: identifying unhinged, demonic states in others.

    Like a literary taxidermist, I want to capture these wild, self-destructive compulsions, mount them for display, and present them with maximum drama—not for amusement, but as cautionary tales. This is my work, my rehabilitation, the writing I was meant to do. And unlike novel-writing, it actually feels like a necessity, not a delusion.

  • Interrogating the Motivations to Write

    Interrogating the Motivations to Write

    Alice Flaherty opens The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain with a quote from Roland Barthes: “A creative writer is one for whom writing is a problem.”

    Problem? That word hardly does justice to the affliction. A problem is misplacing your car keys or forgetting to pay the water bill. What I have is more like a life swallowed whole, a case study in obsession so severe it borders on the pathological. Writing isn’t just a habit; it’s an all-consuming parasite, a compulsion that, in a just world, would require a 12-step program and a sponsor who confiscates my pens at night.

    But since no one is shipping me off to a remote cabin with nothing but an axe and a survival manual, I’ll have to settle for less extreme interventions—like seeking solace in Flaherty’s musings on the so-called writing “problem.”

    As it turns out, my affliction has a clinical name. Flaherty informs me that neurologists call this compulsion hypergraphia—the unrelenting urge to write. In their view, I suffer from an overactive communication drive, a neurochemical malfunction that ensures my brain is forever churning out words, whether the world wants them or not.

    Yet Flaherty, a physician and a neuroscientist, doesn’t merely dissect the neurology; she also acknowledges the rapture, the ecstasy, the fever dream of writing. She describes the transformative power of literature, how great writers fall under its spell, ascending from the mundane to the sacred, riding some metaphorical magic carpet into the great beyond.

    For me, that moment of possession came courtesy of A Confederacy of Dunces. It wasn’t enough to read the book. I had to write one like it. The indignation, the hilarity, the grotesque majesty of Ignatius J. Reilly burrowed into my psyche like a virus, convincing me I had both a moral duty and the necessary delusions of grandeur to bestow a similarly deranged masterpiece upon humanity.

    And I wasn’t alone. Working at Jackson’s Wine & Spirits in Berkeley, my coworkers and I read Dunces aloud between customers, our laughter turning the store into a kind of literary revival tent. Curious shoppers asked what was so funny, we evangelized, they bought copies, and they’d return, eyes gleaming with gratitude. Ignatius, with his unhinged pontifications, made the world seem momentarily less grim. He proved that literature wasn’t just entertainment—it was an antidote to the slow suffocation of daily life.

    Before Dunces, I thought books were just stories. I didn’t realize they could act as battering rams against Plato’s cave, blasting apart the shadows and flooding the place with light.

    During my time at the wine store, we read voraciously: The Ginger Man, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Moravia’s Contempt, Camus’ Notebooks, Borges’ labyrinthine tales. We never said it out loud, but we all understood—life was a dense fog of absurdity and despair, and books were our MREs, the intellectual rations that kept us alive for another day in the trenches.

    Books were our lifeline. They lifted our spirits, fortified our identities, and sharpened our minds like whetstones against the dull blade of existence. They turned us into a ragtag band of literary zealots, clutching our dog-eared pages like relics, singing the praises of Great Literature with the fervor of the Whos in Whoville—except instead of roasting beast, we feasted on Borges and Camus.

    Which brings us to Flaherty’s lament: the Internet is muscling books out of existence, and when books go, so does a vital piece of our humanity.

    What would my memories of Jackson’s be without the shared reverence for literature? It wasn’t just a passion; it was the glue that bound us to each other and to our customers. The conversations, the discoveries, the camaraderie—none of it could be replicated by an algorithm or a meme.

    How can I not think of this in the context of a country still staggering through its post-pandemic hangover of rage, paranoia, and despair? Where the love of books has been trampled beneath an endless scroll of digital sludge, and where human connection has been reduced to strangers launching spiteful grenades at each other across social media—those lawless arenas ruled by soulless tech lords, their pockets fat with the profits of our collective decline?

    Flaherty confesses that her need to dissect the spark of writing—the thing that makes it so irrepressibly human—was an uncontrollable urge, one that made her question whether she suffered from hypergraphia, postpartum mania, or some deeper compulsion to explore what she calls the “Kingdom of Sorrow” after the devastating loss of her prematurely born twin boys. Her search for the root of her writing obsession reminded me of Rainer Maria Rilke’s advice in Letters to a Young Poet: the only writing worth doing is that which one cannot not do.

    Beyond hypergraphia—an affliction rare enough to keep it from becoming a trendy self-diagnosis—Flaherty also tackles the more mundane but far more common malady of writer’s block. She attributes it to mood disorders, procrastination, repressed anxieties, and perhaps a sprinkle of nihilism. I used to wrestle with writer’s block myself, particularly between short stories, back when I entertained the delusion that I might carve out a name for myself in literary fiction. But whenever I think of writer’s block, I think of the one person I’d most like to share a meal with: Fran Lebowitz.

    Lebowitz’s writer’s block has lasted for decades, so long, in fact, that she’s upgraded it to a “writer’s blockade.” If Blaise Pascal was an acid-tongued intellectual defending faith, Lebowitz is the sharp-tongued patron saint of the New York literati, delivering high-caliber cultural commentary with the precision of a diamond-tipped drill. That she doesn’t write is a cosmic joke. That people care she doesn’t write is part of her legend. That her off-the-cuff witticisms are more electrifying than most books in print makes her, without question, my literary idol.

    And yet, my devotion to Lebowitz only reveals the terminal nature of my writing affliction. If a genie granted me the chance to swap lives with her—to tour the world, bask in standing ovations, and deliver effortless, unfiltered cultural critique to sold-out crowds—but on the condition that I could never write another book, I would turn it down without hesitation. This refusal confirms the depths of my sickness. In this hypothetical scenario, books themselves are mere shadows compared to the brilliance of Lebowitz’s conversation. And yet, here I am, clinging to the shadows, convinced that somewhere in those pages, I will find the thing that makes existence bearable.

    Surely, no specialist can diagnose a disease like this, much less cure it.

    Reading Flaherty’s sharp and introspective book, I found myself circling a familiar question: is the urge to write both a pathology and a gift? This led me straight to The Savage God, A. Alvarez’s bleak yet compelling account of depression, suicide, and literature. Across history, writers afflicted by melancholy, madness, or sheer existential despair have been cast as tragic geniuses, indulgent sinners, or misunderstood romantics, depending on the prevailing religious and literary winds.

    Take Sylvia Plath, the confessional poet who sealed her fate at thirty, or John Kennedy Toole, the tortured author of A Confederacy of Dunces, who asphyxiated himself at thirty-one. Conventional wisdom holds that Toole’s despair stemmed from his inability to publish his novel, but Tom Bissell, in “The Uneasy Afterlife of A Confederacy of Dunces,” suggests a more tangled story—one of creeping paranoia and the pressures of academia, where Toole, at twenty-two, was the youngest professor in Hunter College’s history.

    Like his doomed creator, Ignatius J. Reilly is possessed by the need to write. His screeds, stitched together from the wisdom of Boethius, function less as arguments and more as the existential flailings of a man convinced that writing will bring him salvation. He writes because he must, the way a fish swims—to stay alive.

    Bissell’s most cutting insight isn’t about Toole’s life, but about his novel’s fundamental flaw: Dunces is riddled with indulgences—flabby with adverbs, allergic to narrative structure, and populated with characters so exaggerated they teeter on the edge of cartoonhood. He argues that Dunces is “a novel that might have been considerably more fun to write than it is to read.” This line stopped me cold.

    Why? Because Dunces was my Rosetta Stone, my gateway drug to the idea of becoming a comic novelist. And yet here was the brutal truth: the very book that set me on this path was a wreck of undisciplined excess. If Dunces ruined my life, it did so not because it failed, but because I absorbed its flaws as gospel. I inhaled its bloated exuberance, its unshackled absurdity, and made it my literary template.

    To undergo a religious experience from a flawed book is to risk a kind of artistic contamination—you don’t just inherit its brilliance, you inherit its sins. My writing compulsion is perhaps nothing more than Dunces’ worst tendencies metastasized in my brain.

    And so, as a recovering writing addict, I am forced to sit with this painful revelation and digest it like a bad meal—one that demands an industrial-strength antacid.

    At the beginning of this book, I claimed that A Confederacy of Dunces ruined my life. It was a ridiculous, melodramatic statement—fatuous, even. But after considering its messy influence over my work, I can’t help but think: there’s more truth in it than I’d like to admit.