Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • The Teen Who Had It All Figured Out

    The Teen Who Had It All Figured Out

    I was sure my teenage bodybuilding quest would bring me fame and fortune. Signs of my impending greatness seemed everywhere. Not only had I developed an unusually muscular physique for a seventeen-year-old, but I also believed I possessed extraordinary networking abilities that boded well for my future as a world-famous bodybuilder and tropical gym entrepreneur. After all, while ordinary teenagers worried about algebra quizzes and acne, I was training alongside professional athletes and cultivating what I considered elite social capital.

    At The Weight Room in Hayward, for example, I worked out regularly with John Matuszak, the massive NFL defensive end known to fans as “The Tooz.” For reasons still unclear to me, Matuszak had taken a liking to me, and I interpreted this as further confirmation that destiny had marked me for greatness.

    Between sets of bench presses, T-bar rows, and seated behind-the-neck presses, we sang along to whatever soft-rock ballad drifted through the gym speakers. Watching the Tooz and me harmonize with Nicolette Larson singing Neil Young’s “Lotta Love” was one of those surreal spectacles only the late 1970s could produce. There we were surrounded by clanging iron, ammonia salts, sweat puddles, and steroidal aggression while two men built like escaped Vikings serenaded one another with tender California pop lyrics.

    People often spoke fearfully of Matuszak’s temper, but during our workouts the atmosphere felt less like an NFL locker room and more like a chemically enhanced Kumbaya retreat.

    Television could not adequately prepare you for Matuszak in person. He was a biological event. Standing close to seven feet tall and weighing nearly three hundred pounds, he somehow appeared lanky and gigantic simultaneously, as though his limbs had been stretched by industrial machinery. He wore his beard and long hair with the wild authority of a mountain outlaw, and his pale predatory eyes possessed the fixed intensity of a hawk searching for movement in distant grasslands.

    One afternoon he sat beside me on a bench while the gym speakers played England Dan and John Ford Coley’s syrupy anthem “Love Is the Answer.” The sentimental lyrics appeared to offend him on a molecular level. He slowly curled his lips, looked at me with utter disgust, and muttered:

    “Bullshit.”

    Then he lay beneath four hundred pounds on the bench press and began repping the weight with terrifying force, repeating the word between repetitions as though contempt itself had become a pre-workout stimulant.

    In addition to networking with John Matuszak, I cultivated what I considered another crucial professional alliance: my relationship with local fitness legend Joe Corsi. In the bodybuilding ecosystem of the San Francisco East Bay, Corsi was practically a minor deity. He sold more supplements, weight-gain powders, and fitness equipment than anyone in the region, and his credentials appeared unimpeachable to my teenage mind because he had once appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger on an episode of The Streets of San Francisco. To me, this television appearance elevated him beyond ordinary humanity and into the sacred cinematic realm of bodybuilding aristocracy.

    Corsi owned a fitness store next door to The Weight Room, and he frequently wandered into the gym to observe the lifters like a seasoned jungle naturalist inspecting promising wildlife. He was already in his late sixties, but he dressed with the flamboyant confidence of a retired nightclub vampire who had recently discovered Nautilus equipment. His uniform consisted of a sleeveless black one-piece jumpsuit in the style of Jack LaLanne, complete with a gold zipper pulled halfway down to reveal a thick mat of black chest hair. His arms remained impressively full and vascular for a man his age, though gravity had begun its slow negotiations with his triceps. His hair was dyed a shade of black so aggressive it looked chemically weaponized. His eyebrows were equally dark, thick, and glossy, giving him the appearance of a man who had personally declared war on aging and refused to surrender despite mounting evidence.

    Overall, Corsi resembled a geriatric Dracula who had traded bloodlust for protein powder.

    Whenever he saw me training with Matuszak, he showered me with praise. He said I had “world-class structure,” “exceptional symmetry,” and “champion potential.” At seventeen, these remarks struck me not as casual gym flattery but as contractual prophecy. I became convinced that Corsi would soon sponsor me in the same way Joe Weider had sponsored Arnold Schwarzenegger. Any day now, I imagined, trucks would begin arriving at my mother’s house delivering crates of supplements, industrial tubs of protein powder, and enormous butcher-paper-wrapped T-bone steaks intended to fuel my ascent to bodybuilding immortality.

    When this glorious sponsorship materialized, my mother would finally understand that I was not joking about bypassing conventional adulthood altogether. College would be exposed for the pointless detour I knew it to be.

    Unfortunately, my mother remained skeptical.

    After I graduated from high school, she badgered me daily about my future with the persistence of an IRS auditor.

    “What exactly are you going to do with your life?”

    “I already told you,” I said confidently. “Joe Corsi is going to sponsor me.”

    She would stare at me for a moment, then deliver the kind of devastating realism only a financially stressed mother can summon.

    “Well,” she said, “this morning I opened the front door to get the newspaper and I didn’t see a pile of T-bone steaks on the porch. You sure you’ve got a lock on this?”

    Of course, I was sure. What I lacked in viability, I made up for with cocky, self-righteous rectitude.

  • How I Earned a 4.0 at an Educational Daycare Center

    How I Earned a 4.0 at an Educational Daycare Center

    Contrary to the stereotype of the dimwitted musclehead grunting his way through life on canned tuna and narcissism, I earned straight As in high school. The achievement sounds impressive until one examines the intellectual rigor of the institution awarding those grades. Like many public schools of the era, my high school had been academically diluted to the point that a 4.0 GPA carried roughly the same prestige as successfully operating a vending machine.

    One of my classes was called “Money Matters,” a title suggesting perhaps a sophisticated introduction to economics, finance, or capitalist theory. In reality, we spent the semester learning how to balance a checkbook and calculate simple household budgets using arithmetic so elementary it barely rose above first-grade math. Entire afternoons disappeared into worksheets featuring percentages and fractions designed less to challenge the intellect than to sedate it gently. The class felt less like education and more like institutional babysitting with fluorescent lighting.

    Even then I sensed something unsettling beneath the surface: the school system was not especially interested in cultivating thought so much as containing adolescents for eight consecutive hours while their parents worked and briefly recovered from the psychic exhaustion of raising them. Public education functioned as part classroom, part warehouse, part state-sponsored parental relief program. The unspoken social contract seemed obvious: Send us your children all day and we will supervise them long enough for you to survive suburban adulthood.

    Then there was “Popular Lit.”

    The title itself implied engagement with literature, but the course possessed all the academic seriousness of a motel lobby magazine rack. There were no lectures, no discussions, no tests, and no evidence that intellectual life had ever visited the room. For the entire semester, we were instructed to read any three library books we wished and submit three one-page book reports. The astonishing part was that reading the books appeared entirely optional. Students scribbled incoherent nonsense onto the forms, fabricated plots outright, or submitted what looked like fever-dream hallucinations written five minutes before class. It made no difference. As long as paper changed hands, an A materialized.

    The teacher presiding over this educational necropolis was a woman in her sixties who seemed to regard student interaction as an unfortunate workplace hazard. Each day she instructed us to perform “quiet reading” while she sat at her desk reading magazines, paying bills, clipping her fingernails, and radiating terminal disengagement.

    She had the spectral appearance of someone slowly dissolving under fluorescent lights. Her skin was ghoulishly pale. Long strands of dyed black hair hung around her face in greasy disarray. Her lipstick was so dark it resembled bruising, and beneath her eyes hung swollen bags suggesting decades of insomnia, cigarettes, disappointment, or perhaps all three simultaneously. Regardless of temperature, she wore heavy wool coats infused with the stale odor of old sweat, dust, and bodily exhaustion.

    Had you encountered her wandering the campus without context, you would not have guessed she was an educator. You might have assumed she was a homeless drifter scavenging for half-eaten cafeteria burritos near the dumpsters behind the gymnasium. Yet there she sat, entrusted with shaping young minds while silently retreating from humanity one magazine clipping at a time.

    My classes were so intellectually anemic that I often felt I had accidentally enrolled in a continuation school for juvenile delinquents who had been court-ordered to remain indoors until adulthood. Nothing about the curriculum suggested that the faculty envisioned us becoming lawyers, professors, scientists, or members of any recognizable professional class. The educational ambition seemed far more modest: teach us to obey instructions, arrive places on time, avoid armed robbery, and eventually settle into some blue-collar occupation or low-wage service job without setting anything on fire.

    The atmosphere carried a quiet institutional fatalism.

    Even the teachers seemed aware that the entire operation functioned less as an incubator of intellect than as a containment strategy for restless suburban adolescents. One afternoon, I overheard a teacher mutter to a colleague in the hallway with all the weary cynicism of a defeated bureaucrat: “We’re training them to become burger-flippers.”

    The remark should have depressed me. Instead, I found it oddly irrelevant.

    The teachers’ low expectations, their contemptuous resignation, their assumption that only a tiny remnant of us might someday attend college—all of it bounced harmlessly off my adolescent delusions because higher education was never central to my grand design in the first place.

    I had no dream of becoming a respectable professional.

    I intended to become an international bodybuilding celebrity.

    While the school system quietly prepared students for shift work and manageable disappointment, I was privately envisioning a far more glorious future in which I would win Mr. Olympia, achieve worldwide fame, and operate a lavish tropical health club somewhere in the Bahamas where bronzed tourists and muscle celebrities would sip protein shakes beneath swaying palms while admiring my development under ideal Caribbean lighting conditions.

    In other words, while the school trained future burger-flippers, I was preparing to win the Mr. Olympia to set me up for a lifelong career in tanning oil and narcissistic transcendence.

  • Mr. Olympia Goes to College

    Mr. Olympia Goes to College

    I was the worst college student imaginable. Not mediocre. Not distracted. Catastrophically misaligned with the stated purpose of higher education. But before we get to the academic wreckage, we must begin in the fall of 1979 when I arrived at the university at the age of seventeen carrying not intellectual ambition but bodybuilding delusions of tropical grandeur.

    At the time, I was an Olympic weightlifting champion and competitive bodybuilder whose life plan possessed all the sophistication of a teenage steroid fantasy scribbled on a cocktail napkin. I intended to become Mr. Olympia, conquer Mr. Universe, achieve international fame, and eventually leverage my bronzed magnificence into opening a gym somewhere in the Bahamas. My career goals were astonishingly clear: maintain a beautiful body and construct an entire existence devoted to preserving that beautiful body indefinitely.

    As an added strategic advantage, I was deeply attracted to the tropical lifestyle because it minimized the need for clothing. I hated clothes with almost theological intensity. Clothing felt restrictive, oppressive, and fundamentally hostile to my vision of human flourishing. The moment I finished dressing, my immediate impulse was usually to tear everything off again like a deranged orangutan trapped in formalwear.

    This is why the Bahamas seemed ideal.

    No parkas. No wool sweaters. No suffocating layers of civilization.

    Just tanning oil, ocean air, and perpetual existence in bodybuilding briefs.

    People today talk endlessly about “life hacks,” usually involving productivity apps or minimalist desk setups. Allow me to offer a superior life hack developed by my seventeen-year-old brain in 1979: eliminate clothes altogether. There’s your optimization strategy. Imagine the savings alone. No suits. No winter jackets. No agonizing over fashion. Merely rotate between several pairs of Speedos while glistening permanently beneath the Caribbean sun like a narcissistic sea mammal.

    This, I believed, was adulthood perfected.

    Meanwhile, the university mistakenly assumed I had arrived to pursue an education.

    Whenever I shared this magnificent vision of my future with my recently divorced mother—who was meanwhile trying to perform minor financial miracles just to keep us solvent—she reacted with the exhausted realism of someone who had actually paid utility bills before.

    “Don’t be a nincompoop,” she would say. “You can’t isolate yourself from the world on some tropical island.”

    But I was seventeen, chemically saturated with bodybuilding mythology, and utterly immune to practical concerns.

    “Don’t worry, Mom,” I assured her with the confidence of a man who had never balanced a checkbook. “I’ll be well connected. I’ll invite all my celebrity bodybuilding friends to visit me.”

    Then I would begin listing names with reverential excitement as though reading apostles from sacred scripture: Frank Zane, Tom Platz, Robbie Robinson, Kalman Szkalak, Danny Padilla, Ron Teufel, Pete Grymkowski, Rudy Hermosillo. In my imagination, these men were not distant figures from glossy muscle magazines but intimate companions who would naturally gather around my future Bahamian gym drinking pineapple protein shakes while discussing symmetry, calf development, and the spiritual dimensions of hypertrophy.

    I envisioned myself lounging beside them under swaying palms while explaining how bodybuilding had catalyzed my personal metamorphosis into a bronzed titan of self-actualization.

    My mother stared at me with the expression of a woman realizing she had accidentally raised a delusional peacock.

    “You sound ridiculous,” she said flatly. “For one thing, those aren’t your friends. They’re from your muscle magazines. I’m not stupid.”

    Her remark landed with the force of unwanted reality.

    To me, however, the distinction between celebrity and friendship still seemed negotiable. After all, I had spent hundreds of hours studying these men’s physiques in magazines with such devotional intensity that I felt we already shared a profound spiritual bond. Surely if they someday met me on my tropical bodybuilding island, glistening heroically in tanning oil while handing them frosty pineapple shakes, they too would recognize the connection.

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    My parents liked to remind me that before IBM rescued my father with a job offer and transplanted us from Florida to California, we were so poor they sold blood to hospitals to help feed me. This family anecdote was repeated with the solemn gravity of frontier folklore, as though I had survived the Donner Party rather than early childhood. We lived in military housing in Gainesville called Flavet Villages, a collection of dreary barracks-style tenements that seemed permanently damp, exhausted, and spiritually defeated. Cockroaches crawled openly along the walls beside my crib as though they too paid rent and felt entitled to common areas.

    Nearby sat an alligator swamp whose odor drifted across the housing complex with biblical hostility. Around dawn and twilight especially, the air became thick with a feculent stench that smelled like Satan’s compost bin after a seafood boil. The swamp seemed less a natural ecosystem than a punishment assigned to the poor. Everything about Flavet Villages communicated scarcity, mildew, resignation, and the understanding that comfort belonged to other people living elsewhere.

    Then came the phone call from IBM.

    Just like that, our trajectory changed. My father packed us into a late-1950s Mercury and drove westward toward what had not yet become Silicon Valley but was already beginning to hum with technological ambition and California mythology. We rolled down Highway 101, exited at Tully Road in San Jose, and arrived at what, to our eyes, looked less like an apartment complex than a tropical resurrection.

    The Royal Lanai apartments embodied that distinctly mid-century California fantasy in which ordinary suburban housing attempted to impersonate a Polynesian resort through sheer landscaping optimism. The place radiated the confidence of an era convinced that lava rock, palm trees, and decorative stonework could transport middle-class renters into an exotic island paradise situated conveniently between a supermarket and a freeway exit.

    Dark volcanic rocks framed the walkways. Palmettos and fan palms swayed above flowerbeds bursting with oversized sunflowers and dense tropical greenery. The buildings themselves were decorated with rough lava stone and jagged field rock embedded into the stucco, as though cooled magma had erupted directly into suburban San Jose. Sprinklers hissed across the landscaping in the evening light while the California sun reflected warmly against the black volcanic stone.

    Compared to Flavet Villages, the Royal Lanai felt impossibly glamorous.

    We had crossed from swamp funk to Polynesian fantasy.

    From cockroaches to lava rock.

    From survival to aspiration.

    And though we were still renters living in an apartment complex beside a busy road, to my parents it must have felt as though IBM had not merely offered employment but delivered us personally into the American Dream wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and carrying a briefcase.

    The monthly pilgrimage to the manager’s office to pay the rent filled my mother with a kind of triumphant delight. She treated the occasion less like a financial obligation and more like admission into respectable civilization. Before leaving the apartment, she would proudly hold up the giant green circular keychain embossed with our apartment number, the metal house key dangling from it like a sacred relic proving we belonged at the Royal Lanai. Then she would invite me to accompany her on the journey as though we were visiting royalty rather than paying one hundred dollars for another month of tenancy.

    The rent itself seemed magical in its perfect roundness: exactly one hundred dollars. Not ninety-eight. Not one hundred and seven. One hundred dollars precisely, as if the evenness of the number confirmed the elegance of our new life beneath the palms and lava rock.

    At five years old, I found these expeditions endlessly fascinating because nearly everything at the Royal Lanai felt luxurious compared to the swampy deprivation stories my parents told about Florida. The manager’s office in particular possessed the aura of a tiny tropical embassy of abundance. Behind the desk sat Betty, the matronly apartment manager, smiling with the patient warmth of a woman who had seen thousands of tenants pass through her domain and knew exactly how much the place meant to young families trying to ascend into middle-class respectability.

    Inside the office stood a humming water cooler beside neat stacks of tiny paper cups that I treated with almost ceremonial reverence. Nearby sat a glass jar overflowing with sugar cubes, and Betty always assured me they were mine for the taking. This struck me as extraordinary generosity. To a small child raised on stories of blood-selling poverty and cockroach-infested tenements, unlimited cold water and unrestricted access to sugar felt like evidence that we had entered a realm of unimaginable prosperity.

    The Royal Lanai seemed less like an apartment complex than a perpetual vacation for ordinary people. Everything shimmered with promise: the tropical landscaping, the black lava rocks warming beneath the California sun, the palms rustling overhead, the miraculous availability of chilled water and refined sugar whenever my childish whims demanded them. In my mind, paradise was not complicated. Paradise was a paper cup of cold water, two stolen sugar cubes melting on your tongue, and a giant green keychain proving your family had finally escaped the swamp.

    The monthly rent at the Royal Lanai took my parents a while to psychologically absorb. One hundred dollars a month may sound quaint now, but to them it carried the emotional weight of financing Versailles. To diffuse their anxiety, they invented an elaborate family joke that my mother might soon have to supplement my father’s IBM salary by returning to her former career as a flaming sword swallower in the circus.

    According to the mythology they constructed for my benefit, my mother had toured the circus circuit in Alaska before meeting my father. She was apparently a celebrated performer capable of swallowing blazing sabers while balancing on elephants or dangling from trapezes over crowds of drunken laborers eating salted peanuts. To authenticate the story, my parents explained that my mother remained close friends with the circus CEO herself, a powerful woman named Mrs. Dimes, who spent her days inside a cramped trailer-office counting ticket sales with ruthless concentration.

    “Do you want to hear Mrs. Dimes counting the tickets?” they would ask me with theatrical seriousness.

    Then they would direct me toward our heavy avocado-green rotary telephone and instruct me to dial P-O-P-C-O-R-N.

    What I did not understand, of course, was that this connected me to Northern California’s famous “Popcorn Lady,” the automated time service whose calm robotic voice announced the time every ten seconds. My parents convinced me this was Mrs. Dimes tallying circus receipts somewhere deep inside carnival headquarters while deciding whether my mother needed to return to sword swallowing in order to save the family finances.

    For a while I found the whole thing mesmerizing.

    I imagined Mrs. Dimes sitting beneath a dangling light bulb in a smoky trailer counting endless piles of tickets while tigers roared outside and exhausted clowns smoked cigarettes beside cages. The fact that my mother possessed a direct line to the upper management of the circus filled me with awe. It made adulthood seem precarious and theatrical at the same time, as though our entire middle-class existence hung by a thread and one poorly considered supermarket purchase could force my mother to pack her bags and rejoin the carnival economy.

    At first, the game amused me.

    Then one evening, something shifted.

    Perhaps I had become old enough to detect the real anxiety lurking beneath the comedy. Perhaps the repeated references to money finally penetrated my five-year-old understanding. Whatever the reason, the thought of my mother leaving us to join the circus suddenly struck me as horrifyingly plausible.

    I began sobbing uncontrollably.

    The image of her disappearing into some distant caravan of sword swallowers, ticket counters, and exhausted acrobats overwhelmed me completely. My parents immediately abandoned the Mrs. Dimes routine and never played the game again.

    But by then the damage had been done.

    Even at five years old, I had absorbed the terrible adult knowledge that paradise could be lost, that money was fragile, and that somewhere beyond the lava rocks and palm trees of the Royal Lanai lurked the possibility that your mother might have to run away and join the circus to pay the rent.

    It was then that I resolved to prepare myself for the inevitable by joining the circus alongside my mother. If financial catastrophe struck and Mrs. Dimes summoned her back beneath the big top, I would not remain behind abandoned at the Royal Lanai like some emotionally shattered civilian. No. I would reinvent myself as the Strongman: a towering muscular brute in leopard tights capable of snapping chains across his chest, bending steel bars, and hoisting wild animals above his head while astonished crowds applauded beneath clouds of cigarette smoke and popcorn dust.

    My spiritual mentors were not priests or philosophers but superhero comics. The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Prince Namor became my prophets of muscular transcendence. Their impossible physiques convinced me that strength was not merely aesthetic but salvific. Muscles could rescue families. Biceps could repel humiliation. Triceps might even keep your mother from disappearing into itinerant circus labor.

    I therefore began training with whatever equipment the apartment provided. My parents’ heavy lacquered ceramic ashtrays became dumbbells. Luggage became resistance equipment. Every object in the apartment was reinterpreted through the feverish logic of childhood bodybuilding ambition. Somewhere between the lava rocks and the sunflower gardens of the Royal Lanai, I became convinced that physical strength was the answer to economic instability, emotional terror, and perhaps existence itself.

    Then came the Charles Atlas ads.

    Those advertisements struck me with the force of religious revelation. There was always the same tragic spectacle: a scrawny weakling being publicly humiliated at the beach while some square-jawed bully kicked sand in his face and stole his girlfriend with the efficiency of a hostile corporate takeover. But then the runt discovered the Charles Atlas system, trained with evangelical discipline, and returned transformed into a muscular avenger. The bully was defeated. The girl was reclaimed. Cosmic balance was restored. Civilization itself seemed to exhale in relief.

    The moral architecture of the universe suddenly became clear to me:
    Train hard. Build yourself. Never surrender. Muscles are destiny.

    This, I believed, was the true American Dream—not suburban comfort or upward mobility, but the ability to transform fear and humiliation into brute force through relentless self-improvement.

    If things became desperate enough, I could save my family.

    I could become the Strongman.

    My mother and I would travel the circus together, inseparable beneath the glow of carnival lights. We would swallow flames, bend steel, astonish crowds, and most importantly, pay the one-hundred-dollar rent on time. We would not be poor swamp people from Florida anymore. We would be winners.

    Thanks to an early literary diet of children’s books, superhero comics, and Charles Atlas advertisements, I grew up convinced that sheer grit and industriousness could conquer virtually anything. My optimism floated through childhood with absurd buoyancy, like a kite somehow suspended in a windless sky by pure American self-help mythology. I had absorbed the sugary gospel of Captain Kangaroo and internalized the moral propaganda of The Little Engine That Could with cult-like devotion. “I think I can” was not merely a line from a children’s story. It was my private war cry. Positive thinking plus relentless effort was supposed to produce triumph, prosperity, admiration, and perhaps eventually heroic forearms.

    Or so I believed.

    Then came October 16, 1967—twelve days before my sixth birthday—the evening my worldview suffered catastrophic structural failure while watching my beloved The Monkees. The episode was titled “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” and it detonated inside my young psyche like a philosophical pipe bomb. Until then, I had believed life operated according to comic-book justice: work hard, improve yourself, defeat the bully, reclaim the girl, restore cosmic order. But this episode introduced me to a far darker force, one nobody had warned me about because I was still too young to grasp the terminology.

    Irony.

    Not ordinary disappointment. Not bad luck. Irony—the grinning sadist of human existence that waits until you have exhausted yourself climbing the mountain before informing you the mountain has moved.

    The episode features my slender, goofy hero Micky Dolenz being publicly humiliated by Bulk, a grotesquely muscular beach tyrant played by none other than Dave Draper, a man built less like a human being than a refrigerated side of beef. Bulk steals Brenda, the bikini-clad beach goddess, directly from Micky’s orbit while radiating the effortless confidence of a man whose chest measurements could destabilize nearby weather systems.

    Desperate to reclaim his dignity, Micky joins Weaklings Anonymous and submits himself to a punishing training regimen worthy of Cold War experimentation. He lifts weights the size of Buicks. He gulps down fermented goat milk curd, a substance that appeared to possess the texture and emotional flavor profile of liquefied despair. Worst of all, he sells his drum set to finance his transformation, placing the future of the Monkees themselves in jeopardy. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of self-improvement.

    And why?

    Because the Charles Atlas narrative promised salvation.

    Suffer now. Train hard. Become magnificent later.

    Micky returns to the beach transformed into a muscular Adonis, his arms swollen, his confidence restored, fully prepared to reclaim Brenda and reestablish moral equilibrium in the universe.

    But then Irony arrives carrying a baseball bat.

    During Micky’s transformation into Hercules, Brenda has grown bored with physical brutes. Muscles are now gauche. Predictable. Vulgar. She has pivoted dramatically toward intellectualism and now desires a frail, pencil-necked pseudo-scholar whose chief accomplishment appears to be reading In Search of Lost Time at the beach while ignoring sunlight and human joy. The new object of her affection sits there clutching Proust with all the erotic magnetism of a graduate seminar on French memory theory.

    Apparently, somewhere between Micky’s bench presses and fermented goat secretions, the cultural winds had shifted.

    Bodybuilders were out.

    Pretentious literary anemia was in.

    As I watched Micky’s heartbreak unfold onscreen, my own little heart cracked alongside his. Every lesson I had absorbed about hard work, perseverance, and self-discipline suddenly felt suspect. The universe, I realized, did not necessarily reward effort. You could labor heroically, endure humiliation, drink industrial quantities of goat sludge, and still discover that reality had changed the rules while you were busy training.

    The revelation devastated me.

    It was like discovering that Santa Claus was not merely fictional but actively mocking you from behind the curtains of existence.

    After that episode, childhood optimism no longer felt trustworthy. The clean moral geometry of comic books dissolved. From then on, I wandered through life carrying the vague existential sadness of a tiny philosopher betrayed by television comedy. Somewhere deep inside me, Micky Dolenz was still standing on that beach holding his rebuilt muscles while Brenda walked away with a man reading Proust.

  • What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?

    On a bright spring afternoon in Southern California in 1998, my college writing class was dissecting evil with the clinical confidence of people who believed it could be contained in literature. We were discussing The Painted Bird, a novel so saturated with human cruelty that it feels less like fiction and more like a dare. The room hummed with theories—evil as social construct, evil as pathology—until my students quietly dismantled the abstraction. They believed in evil not as metaphor, but as presence. Ghosts. Demons. Things seen and not forgotten.

    One single mother spoke of something that crawled beneath her bed at night. She said it plainly, without theatrics, which made it worse. Another student, a nurse in her forties who worked long shifts at UCLA, waited until after class. “I have a story,” she said, as if announcing a diagnosis that required privacy.

    She didn’t look like someone given to fantasy. She was compact, practical, her thick glasses enlarging eyes worn down by long hours and human frailty. Her stories usually involved difficult patients or her childhood in rural Louisiana—earthbound things. But as she began, her voice shifted, acquiring a distant cadence, as if she were tuning into a frequency not meant for daylight.

    She was six or seven at the time, roaming the backwoods with her cousin Carmen. No supervision, no schedule, no adult intervention. Their days were filled with the idle cruelty of children left alone too long—tormenting small animals, inventing games that escalated from mischief into something darker. There were no witnesses, no consequences, and so no brakes.

    Until one afternoon.

    They were inside the farmhouse, a sagging structure with a porch that complained with every step. The screen door creaked open. A man walked in and sat down in the living room as if he owned the place.

    But he wasn’t a man.

    She struggled to describe him without sounding ridiculous. He wasn’t clothed, but that detail felt irrelevant. His body was covered in coarse, matted fur. His skin—if it could be called that—had the pallor and texture of a rodent. Behind him trailed a long, muscular tail that slid along the floor and flicked against the doorframe like a living whip. He looked like something assembled from nightmare logic: a giant rat that had decided to stand upright and enter a house.

    The girls didn’t run. They couldn’t. Fear locked them in place, as if the room itself had thickened.

    He began to speak.

    For hours—she was certain it lasted hours—he sat in that chair and talked. His voice was low and abrasive, as if it scraped its way into the room. He told stories about the things he had done, the damage he had caused, the harm he had perfected. Time lost its structure. The afternoon stretched into something shapeless and suffocating.

    Then he turned his attention to them.

    “I’ve seen how bad you girls are,” he said. “I’ve seen what you’ve been doing.”

    And then he began to list their offenses. Not generalities—details. Every small cruelty, every secret act they had committed when no one was around. Things no adult had witnessed. Things no one could have reported.

    “I’m going to recruit you,” he said. “I’m going to make you mine.”

    The threat didn’t rise in volume. It settled into the room, thick and toxic, like something you could breathe in and never fully expel. His eyes stayed on them the entire time, unblinking, patient, certain. He described what would happen if they continued, not in vague moral warnings, but in precise, almost administrative terms—consequences rendered as inevitabilities.

    The girls sat frozen, their bodies no longer their own.

    And then, as casually as he had entered, he stood up and left. The tail followed him out like an afterthought, sliding across the threshold and disappearing into the heat.

    Silence rushed back into the house.

    Carmen finally whispered, “Did you see that?”

    My student nodded. Speech had abandoned her.

    From that day forward, their lives snapped into alignment. No more cruelty. No more experimentation with harm. They went to church. They prayed. They obeyed. Not out of virtue, but out of fear sharpened into obedience. Whatever had visited them had not suggested a path—it had enforced one.

    I would have preferred to dismiss the story as delusion, but that option didn’t fit the teller. This was a woman trained to assess reality, to separate symptom from fabrication. She spoke without embellishment, without the slightest interest in persuading me. She wasn’t selling a story; she was reporting an event that had rearranged her life.

    It unsettled me more than I expected.

    At the time, I was living alone in a condo in Redondo Beach, the kind of place that feels harmless until night gives it edges. One evening, I had a dream about the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz. Only this version had shed all pretense of cowardice. He chased me, snarling, his face twisted into something feral and wrong.

    I woke up, but the dream didn’t fully release me.

    At the foot of my bed, I felt it—presence. Not a thought, not a leftover image, but something that occupied space. The lion-man sat there, immense, silent, undeniable. Fear pinned me in place. Breathing became an effort, as if the air itself had thickened in protest.

    In that moment of terror, the dumbest thought came over me: What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s visited by an evil entity at 2 a.m.?

    After several long seconds of thinking about my rhetorical question, I forced movement into my body. I stood, walked up the stairs on unsteady legs, poured a glass of water like someone performing a ritual they barely believed in. When I returned, I flooded the room with light, turned on the television, filled the silence with noise until the presence thinned and finally dissolved.

    Like pain receding from a crushed hand—slow, stubborn, but eventually gone.

    What stayed was the recognition.

    This was not my first encounter with that particular demon. Ever since the age of five, I had carried a pathological terror of The Wizard of Oz’s Cowardly Lion, played by Bert Lahr with such unnerving desperation that the performance ceased to feel theatrical and crossed into something infernal. Every year when the movie aired on television, I experienced the same ritual dread: excitement curdled into panic. I wanted to watch the film because everyone watched it, because it was supposedly magical and wholesome and woven into the fabric of American childhood. But I could not look directly at the Lion’s face. Not for even a second.

    There was something about the grotesque architecture of that mask—the swollen cheeks, the creased forehead, the frantic eyes flickering through the narrow slits—that convinced me I was not looking at a costume but at a leak from another realm. To glimpse him was to receive unauthorized intelligence about what demons in hell actually looked like. Other children saw a lovable neurotic feline. I saw a panic-stricken emissary from the abyss.

    The Cowardly Lion colonized my dreams for years. I would wake in the middle of the night drenched in sweat, my heart jackhammering against my ribs. But waking up offered no relief. The nightmare did not end when consciousness returned; it merely changed venues. I could still feel the Lion in the room with me. Sometimes I sensed him sitting on the edge of my bed in the darkness while an icy current climbed my spine vertebra by vertebra. My chest tightened. My breathing became shallow and frantic. I was certain I would either suffocate, faint, or be dragged bodily into some spiritual sewer beyond childhood comprehension.

    Eventually I buried these terrors beneath the sediment of ordinary life. Or so I thought.

    Then came the summer of 1984. I was twenty-two years old and asleep one morning when I dreamed I was sprinting across a vast field toward a circle of flames. Beyond the fire stood an oasis shimmering with impossible beauty, a place radiating peace, love, and release from whatever unnamed anguish had dogged me since childhood. I knew with absolute certainty that if I could pass through the flames, I would arrive somewhere transformed.

    But just as I approached the burning circle, the Cowardly Lion stepped directly into my path.

    The effect was instantaneous. My body failed. Terror seized me with such total authority that I could no longer run. Worse, I could not scream. My mouth opened, but only muffled animal noises emerged while my lungs constricted so violently I thought I would suffocate inside the dream itself.

    Then came the truly impossible part.

    I awoke.

    At least I believed I awoke.

    I was lying flat on my back in bed, fully conscious, staring into the dim morning light of my room when I began to rise. Slowly. Smoothly. Silently. About a foot above the mattress.

    There was no drama to it. No spinning. No celestial music. Just the hideous calm of impossible physics.

    For what felt like ten seconds, perhaps longer, I floated there suspended above the bed in absolute terror before descending gradually back onto the mattress.

    I lay frozen afterward, unable to decide which possibility frightened me more: that I had actually levitated or that my mind had finally snapped under the pressure of its own private mythology.

    Naturally, I told no one.

    Who admits such things? Madmen? Cult leaders? Future occupants of padded rooms?

    So the experience became another sealed chamber inside me, another secret shoved into psychic storage beside the Lion himself.

    Then, years later, when I was thirty-seven, one of my nursing students casually described being visited in dreams by a grotesque rat-man figure. The moment she spoke, the old terror returned in full force. The Lion-Man rose from the graveyard of memory and stood before me again, and with him came the sickening recollection of floating above my bed in the summer of 1984 like some frightened counterfeit saint in a low-budget religious hallucination.

    Peeling back these memories feels less like reflection and more like excavating radioactive material. What occurs to me now is that humanity divides itself into two broad species. First are the literalists, the hard-material people who believe the physical world is the entire inventory of existence. What can be measured, photographed, weighed, biopsied, and touched is real. Everything else is sentimental fog generated by weak nerves and overheated imaginations. For these people, reality is a Home Depot aisle of concrete objects. No mystery. No metaphysical leakage. No shadows moving beneath the floorboards of ordinary life. What you see is what you get.

    I used to train with one of these specimens back in my teenage bodybuilding days, a granite-headed materialist named Falco Labroni. One evening we attended a church youth spaghetti dinner where a sweating youth pastor was passionately explaining salvation, heaven, hell, and eternal judgment between bites of garlic bread. Falco listened with the same skeptical expression he reserved for mail-order ab machines. Finally, he interrupted the sermon to announce that he would refuse to believe in heaven or hell unless Jacques Cousteau personally explored both places in a submarine and returned with film footage.

    Falco was what I now call a Film-in-Hand Absolutist.

    No footage, no faith.

    If Satan could not be captured on 16mm color film while smoking a cigar beside a lava pit, Falco wasn’t buying it. To him, metaphysics without documentation was merely indigestion wearing a choir robe.

    Then there is the other category of person—the unfortunate tribe to which I belong. These are the people cursed with imaginations porous enough to let other realities seep through. We sense shadows where others see empty rooms. We suspect hidden dimensions pressing faintly against ordinary life like faces against frosted glass. We dream vividly, feel presences, glimpse symbolic patterns, and occasionally become convinced the universe is leaking messages through nightmares, coincidences, music, illness, or memory. These people do not require film because the experience itself brands them from the inside.

    For us, life is never merely literal.

    It is layered.

    Ambiguous.

    Haunted.

    The world arrives wrapped in penumbra. Every object casts not just a shadow but the suggestion of another kingdom attached to it. A hallway at night is never just a hallway. A face can become an omen. A dream can feel more historically significant than an actual afternoon.

    Unfortunately, once you belong to this category, you never fully return to the clean reassuring geometry of materialism. You can pretend. You can teach freshman composition, pay your taxes, discuss cholesterol numbers, and shop for sensible shoes at Costco. But somewhere in the back chambers of your mind, the Lion-Man still breathes softly in the dark, waiting for the lights to go out.

    Looking back now, I see 1998 as my Lion-Man Year, the year the shadow world stopped politely knocking and simply let itself inside. My nerves were frayed, my concentration was dissolving, and my mind drifted through ordinary life as though half of it were trapped in some invisible underworld. Inevitably, this absentmindedness led me to commit one of academia’s unforgivable sins: I lost my university key.

    This catastrophe required me to report to a college administrator whose emotional warmth suggested she had once been rejected by both the priesthood and the prison system for being excessively severe. The moment I explained my predicament, her face hardened into a mask of institutional disgust.

    “The one thing,” she said slowly, as though speaking to a parole violator, “that a college instructor does not do is lose his key.”

    She looked me up and down not as a fellow employee but as a suspicious transient who had wandered onto campus carrying a forged faculty ID and a duffel bag full of stolen microscopes. Her lips curled with contempt as she informed me I would need to drive to a remote outpost on the edge of campus called Plant-Ops and pay cash for a replacement.

    Cash only.

    Naturally.

    Because nothing says “modern institution of higher learning” quite like a disciplinary pilgrimage to a bureaucratic wasteland requiring physical currency, shame, and emotional self-flagellation.

    Mortified, I drove eastward away from campus civilization. At first the road was paved, lined with ordinary buildings and signs of human order. But gradually the asphalt surrendered to dirt, potholes, rubble, and terrain better suited for Cold War tank exercises. My car bucked and lurched violently as though objecting to the mission itself.

    The landscape became increasingly apocalyptic.

    Tumbleweeds rolled across the path. Cow skulls appeared beside the road like decorations from a satanic rodeo. Buzzards circled lazily overhead, apparently alerted that some weakened academic had wandered too far from the faculty lounge and was nearing collapse.

    I no longer felt as though I were in Southern California.

    I felt I had crossed into a parallel dimension where failed instructors, cursed livestock, and bureaucratic shame went to die. The air itself seemed infected with rumors of evil.

    Then came the smell.

    As I approached Plant-Ops, a chemical stench engulfed the car—a nauseating cocktail of glue, industrial paint, mildew, overheated machinery, and cow manure baking beneath the sun. The odor struck me with such force that I became dizzy. My skin grew clammy. Sweat collected beneath my collar. I was convinced I either had a fever or had accidentally driven into the outer perimeter of hell’s maintenance department.

    Part of me wanted to turn the car around immediately, flee home, collapse into bed, and abandon the entire miserable enterprise. But I was too close now. The replacement key had become more than a key. It was absolution. Redemption stamped in metal.

    So I sat there gripping the steering wheel, breathing through waves of nausea, wiping sweat from my forehead like a condemned man approaching the gallows. Then I took a deep breath and drove forward into the wasteland.

    After driving for what felt like several geological eras, I finally saw Plant-Ops emerge from the heat shimmer like a hallucination summoned by exhaustion and institutional shame. The structure sat alone on a wasteland of gravel and dust, a dilapidated hangar that looked less like a university maintenance facility and more like the final headquarters of a collapsing dictatorship.

    The oversized shack had been assembled from enormous sheets of tin and aluminum that appeared to be barely holding together through a desperate alliance of rusted screws, crooked nails, and divine neglect. Every gust of wind threatened to peel the building apart and scatter it across the desert like the world’s saddest deck of cards. The metal walls were coated in a grotesque patina of stains, corrosion, and industrial runoff that resembled toxic sludge bubbling up from the underworld itself. It looked as though Satan’s HVAC department had subcontracted the job to the lowest bidder.

    The entire structure radiated bureaucratic doom.

    This was not a place where things were repaired. This was where broken things came to surrender.

    Reluctantly, I stepped out of my car and began trudging across the gravel toward the hangar. Each footstep felt ceremonial, as though I were approaching some punitive tribunal reserved for the absentminded and spiritually unwell. The smell intensified with every yard I crossed—a nauseating fusion of chemicals, mildew, scorched metal, industrial glue, wet dirt, and something faintly organic, as though livestock had died nearby and been left to ferment beneath the sun. My stomach pitched violently. I fought the urge to vomit, faint, or simply curl into the fetal position beside a tumbleweed and surrender to my fate.

    Inside, I encountered the caretaker of this infernal outpost.

    He was a short, hostile little man with thick glasses, a bushy gray mustache, and black wisps of hair clinging desperately to his bald scalp like spiders trapped in tar. He wore a grease-splattered work apron that looked as though it had absorbed forty years of mechanical despair. Standing over a scarred wooden workbench, he glared at me with bulging amphibian eyes while eating cold SpaghettiOs directly from the can. The fluorescent light above him cast a morgue-like glow across his cadaverous face. He looked less like a maintenance worker and more like a cemetery groundskeeper who moonlighted as an interrogator.

    I explained that I had lost my university key.

    Without sympathy or ceremony, he demanded twenty dollars in cash upfront. Then he grunted toward the key machine.

    “Don’t ever lose your key again,” he muttered.

    He paused, then gave a dry laugh.

    “And if you think dealing with me is bad, wait till the guy replacing me next week. He makes me look like a picnic at the beach.”

    The remark amused him enormously. He opened his mouth wide enough for me to glimpse rotten teeth stained the color of nicotine and despair. It was the laugh of a man whose personality had been slowly pickled in bitterness, isolation, and fluorescent lighting.

    Then his expression changed.

    He studied me more carefully now, concern pushing aside suspicion.

    “You don’t look so good,” he said.

    “The smell,” I blurted weakly.

    That made him laugh again.

    “I’m used to it,” he said. “But you better lie down. Cot’s over there.”

    He pointed toward a filthy army cot near the workbench with an index finger sporting a blackened fingernail thick as tortoise shell.

    I thanked him with the dazed politeness of a fever patient entering surgery and stumbled toward the cot. The canvas sagged beneath me as I collapsed onto it, drenched in clammy sweat, and watched him begin making my replacement key.

    The key-cutting machine crouched in the corner like a dormant execution device awaiting orders from the state. It was enormous, greasy, and coated with decades of metallic filth baked into its surface like industrial scar tissue. Iron filings glittered in the grime like black snow. Above it hung a single exposed bulb flickering weakly, as though even electricity struggled to survive inside Plant-Ops.

    The old man fed the blank key into the machine and yanked the lever.

    Instantly the contraption erupted awake.

    The sound was catastrophic.

    A metallic shriek tore through the hangar with such violence it felt capable of stripping paint from bone. The grinding wheel screamed against the brass with the tortured howl of some living creature being dissected alive. Sparks burst outward into the darkness while gears rattled and chattered with arthritic fury. The machine did not sound manufactured. It sounded enraged. Ancient. Biological.

    The noise penetrated my feverish skull until I no longer believed a key was being cut. It felt as though judgment itself was being engraved into metal.

    And then it happened.

    In the middle of that infernal screeching, my body began to rise.

    Slowly.

    Smoothly.

    I lifted a foot—perhaps two feet—above the cot.

    Terror detonated inside me. I tried to scream, but paralysis sealed my throat shut. I could neither move nor cry out. I floated there helplessly while the machine screamed like an industrial banshee beside me.

    In my terrified state, I mumbled, “What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if he’s levitating in some demon’s lair?”

    The old handyman glanced over casually.

    “Almost done,” he said.

    There was no shock in his voice. No alarm whatsoever. He regarded my levitation with the mild indifference of a mechanic watching a customer’s tire pressure fluctuate. It was as though hovering terrified college instructors were simply another routine inconvenience at Plant-Ops.

    “There,” he announced a moment later. “Finished.”

    At those words, my body slowly descended back onto the cot.

    The smell no longer bothered me. In fact, I suddenly felt calm—eerily calm—as though some fever had broken or some invisible tribunal had decided to spare me.

    The handyman handed me the new key.

    I thanked him, staggered back outside, and escaped the haunted hangar with the gratitude of a prisoner released from a penal colony.

    From there I drove directly to a hardware store and bought the most indestructible keychain apparatus I could find: Kevlar tether, reinforced reel, industrial belt loop, military-grade nylon. I clipped the thing to my belt like survival equipment for a man preparing to cross hostile terrain.

    Because by then the keychain no longer represented mere organization.

    It was a tether to reality itself.

    A safety line.

    A guarantee that I would remain anchored to the ordinary world and not drift loose again into those shadow realms waiting patiently beyond the edges of consciousness.

    What does it profit a man to have tenure and live by the beach if at any moment he can become untethered to faraway places from which he can never return? 

  • The Ghost Story That Ruined My Archives

    The Ghost Story That Ruined My Archives

    I have been writing short stories for decades, which is another way of saying I have spent a large portion of my life producing evidence that enthusiasm and achievement are not the same thing. The cruel part is that I have improved. The older I get, the better I write, and the better I write, the more my earlier work begins to look like juvenilia wearing a fake mustache.

    Recently, I wrote a ghost story and morality tale called “The Ghost of Sid Briggs,” and to my surprise, it pleases me. That is rare. It made me think of the writers I revere most, especially John Cheever and Haruki Murakami, masters of the strange domestic wound, the moral haunting, the ordinary world with a trapdoor under it.

    So I became hopeful that I could add my ghost story to my long list of stories I’ve written over the years. I thought: Maybe I have a dozen stories buried in my archives. Maybe I can exhume them, clean them off, tighten the sentences, give them a new spine, and assemble a collection worthy of my literary heroes.

    Then I looked at the list. The verdict was swift and merciless. I did not have a dozen stories. I had only one that was the result of several rewrites over the last decade. I finally reached the point that it feels fully formed. I titled it “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.” It is a coming-of-age ghost story about a charismatic young bodybuilder and pathological liar whose life ends absurdly and tragically from a bee sting at a California lakeside beach. Narrated by a fellow young man who is both fascinated and repelled by Sid’s relentless self-mythologizing, the story explores male vanity, performance, fraudulence, and the seductive narcotic of reinvention. After Sid’s death, the narrator becomes haunted by recurring dreams in which Sid walks across a twilight lake to confess that, in his dying moments, he saw the life he might have lived had he abandoned narcissism and embraced love, family, humility, and spiritual truth. The ghostly visitation transforms Sid from beach peacock into cautionary prophet, warning the narrator against wasting life on performance and illusion. Decades later, the narrator continues to wrestle with Sid’s lesson through music, memory, and storytelling, realizing that some men are destroyed not by evil ambitions, but by the desperate need to become a dazzling fiction in the eyes of others.

    This is the one story that meets my current standards. The rest are not dead, exactly, but they are certainly not fit for public life. They would require major reconstruction, literary surgery, perhaps a full identity transplant. Otherwise, back to the dustbin they go, where they can continue their quiet service as compost for better work.

    The clarity over my literary work is sobering. My imagined collection collapsed into a single respectable survivor standing amid the wreckage, blinking in the light. I am not sitting on a hidden treasury of finished stories. I am sitting on a storage unit full of drafts, impulses, false starts, and prose-shaped weather systems. But at least I know the truth. Better that than the narcotic delusion of believing I possess a polished body of work when what I really have is a small literary junkyard with one decent house still standing.

    My literary challenges made me think this morning about my piano compositions. All my best songs point toward some buried autobiographical story. They are not merely melodies; they are emotional crime scenes. Each one seems to contain a memory, a wound, a comic humiliation, a ghost with unfinished business. Perhaps that is the spine I have been missing. Perhaps the stories should grow out of the songs.

    “The Ghost of Sid Briggs” began that way. It was first a piano piece, one I spent months composing, and the story emerged from it after many failed versions, false entrances, and narrative detours. The music held the emotional truth before the prose knew what to do with it.

    I am reminded of the old saying: Life is short, and art is long. At sixty-four, after writing short stories since 1981, I have only one story worthy of a collection. One. If I work hard and avoid wasting too much time congratulating myself for my own seriousness, perhaps I will have three or four before I reach my expiration date.

    This should depress me, and in some ways it does. But it also steadies me. I would rather possess one story that meets my standards than two dozen half-baked literary casseroles masquerading as finished work. A real story has architecture, pressure, mystery, and necessity. A failed story is often just a journal entry wearing a dinner jacket.

    So yes, I am humbled by my limitations. But I am also oddly buoyed by the clarity. The standard is no longer vague. I can see it now. And if most of my work fails to meet it, good. At least I know where the mountain is.

  • The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs

    You can’t understand what it meant to be a teenage boy in 1970s California without inhaling the thick, narcotic perfume of banana-coconut tanning oil. It wasn’t a scent so much as a doctrine. You lay on a beach towel the size of a small sailboat and basted yourself in that viscous syrup as if you were preparing your own body for display. No one spoke of melanoma. The goal was simple: darken, gleam, radiate. Bronze was not just a color—it was a declaration of sexual arrival. For a teenage bodybuilder, it was mandatory. Muscles alone were not enough; they needed lacquer, shine, theatrical finish. We weren’t just building bodies—we were curating mythologies.

    The culture supplied its own scripture. Xaviera Hollander hovered over the decade like a secular saint of libido, her memoir The Happy Hooker tucked into suburban living rooms beside purple bongs that leaned like exhausted sentinels. Her voice—thick Dutch vowels, half invitation, half sermon—drifted through late-night radio, as intoxicating as the oil we poured over ourselves like maple syrup on pancakes. If Hollander provided the gospel, Eric Weber supplied the tactics. His book, How to Pick Up Girls!, read like a field manual for social siege warfare: pursue, persist, override refusal, wear resistance down to compliance. It was less romance than strategy, less courtship than conquest. And like all bad ideas, it traveled quickly among teenage boys who didn’t yet know the difference between confidence and predation.

    At Lake Don Castro in the summer of 1977, we found the living embodiment of this philosophy: Sid Briggs, a thirty-five year-old demigod in blue Speedos. He stood on the grassy knoll above the sand like a monument to self-belief—wavy hair, sculpted mustache, gold chain glinting against a chest that looked permanently backlit. A Playboy cooler at his feet, a boombox humming, a Frisbee orbiting his charisma—Sid was less a man than a recurring performance. We studied him like apprentices. His lines never changed. 

    Every Saturday I heard the following: Sid paid his uncle five hundred dollars for a custom paint job on his Camaro. His father owned expensive real estate in the Bay Area. He had helped manage his father’s properties since he was in high school. He was waiting to hear from a Hollywood studio for a small role as a fighter in a martial arts movie. Even though he never attended college, he had his own house in a desirable part of town called Parsons Estates. Sid would throw in the words “Parsons Estates” as if they were a magical mantra that would make stars sparkle over his coiffed hair.

    Every Saturday, Sid arrived at the man-made beach with a new blonde draped at his side, each one somehow more dazzling and surgically assembled than the last, as if he were upgrading girlfriends through a mail-order catalog of California delusions. They’d toss a Frisbee on the grassy knoll above the imported sand, laughing too loudly, performing youth and leisure for anyone within eyesight. Sid treated the entire shoreline like a stage set built exclusively for his mythology.

    That was when the lies began breeding like bacteria in warm water.

    He inflated his real estate career into the legend of a ruthless young mogul when in reality he was little more than a glorified rent collector for his father’s properties. He claimed to hold a business degree, though everyone knew he’d been booted out of community college after throwing a volcanic tantrum over not getting the campus radio disc jockey position. In Sid’s version of events, he wasn’t a failed student; he was a misunderstood prince denied his throne.

    Then came the aristocratic nonsense. According to Sid, his bloodline could be traced back to Belgian nobility. Somewhere, apparently, stood a family estate complete with a coat of arms, ancestral portraits, and a sacred genealogy book displayed in a special foyer like the Dead Sea Scrolls of mediocre white privilege. The more he lied, the more intoxicated he became by the sound of his own inventions. You could watch it happen in real time. One fabrication fed the next until he drifted into a narcotic haze of self-creation, trapped inside a fantasy version of himself that felt more pleasurable than reality ever could.

    By that point, the women were almost incidental. The true seduction was the performance. Sid didn’t lie to get the conquest. The lies were the conquest.

    I was eager to hear Sid’s lies because, if I’m being honest, I possessed a small talent for self-mythologizing myself. Watching Sid perform his fabrications was like studying my own bad habits through a carnival mirror. I wanted to observe what happened when a man fed himself a steady diet of invented grandeur and then mistook the swelling for genuine substance.

    My greatest obstacle to catching every word was the bees.

    The grassy knoll above the beach was infested with tiny white flowers, and the flowers, in turn, were infested with bees drunk on pollen and purpose. Their buzzing rose and fell in thick waves, sometimes louder than Sid himself. I’d lean forward in my beach chair, squinting through the sunlight, straining to catch the choicest portions of his nonsense as if I were listening to bootleg radio transmissions from a collapsing dictatorship. One moment I’d hear fragments about Belgian aristocracy or shadowy business deals, and the next moment the bees would surge into a collective electric hum, swallowing entire sections of his fantasy whole.

    Oddly enough, the interruptions improved the stories. The missing pieces forced my imagination to collaborate with Sid’s dishonesty. His fabrications became serialized entertainment, half confession and half hallucination, drifting across the hot afternoon air with the smell of Coppertone, cut grass, and imported saltwater.

    ***

    To be called “Bridge and Tunnel” in 1970s San Francisco was not a description; it was a diagnosis. It marked you as a provincial organism, a life-form that had migrated from the East Bay—Hayward, San Leandro, Castro Valley—regions the city regarded as a kind of cultural quarantine zone. By San Francisco standards, we didn’t simply live elsewhere; we existed at a lower altitude of refinement.

    My teenage bodybuilding friends and I would cross the Bay Bridge like contaminants slipping past a border checkpoint, only to be received with the sort of polished contempt reserved for the uninvited. The girls—urban aristocrats of posture and irony—would glance at us, lips tightening into a surgical line, and murmur “Bridge and Tunnel” as if naming a disease. The implication was clear: we had not arrived so much as oozed in, crawling through some damp civic artery to stain their carefully curated world.

    We did little to disprove their assessment. We spent our afternoons at the lake, marinating our skin in tropical bronzing oil with the reckless confidence of men who believed melanoma was a rumor. Between sets of posing and flexing, we argued with prosecutorial intensity over the great philosophical question of our time: Ginger or Mary Ann. This was not idle chatter. This was a loyalty test. Imagine a bare bulb swinging in a concrete cell, a man with broken teeth asking you to choose. Your answer wasn’t right or wrong—it was a measure of your authenticity.

    In truth, there was one answer: Mary Ann. Ginger was spectacle—too lacquered, too deliberate. Mary Ann had gravity. Especially in cut-offs. She was the apex until Daisy Duke arrived and raised the stakes, turning denim cut-offs into doctrine and ushering in a new era of televised exhibitionism.

    Bull, however, took these matters beyond reason. We didn’t realize the depth of his devotion to Gilligan’s Island until KTVU quietly removed it from the schedule. He responded as one might to a death in the family. He kicked his mother’s Sony Trinitron while wearing combat boots—an act of passion undermined by poor planning. The television survived. His shin did not. We spent the afternoon at Eden Medical Center watching him bleed through a makeshift bandage.

    We offered no sympathy.
    “You made us miss Pec Day,” Falco said.

    “And forget donkey calf raises,” I added. “You’re benched for a month. Congratulations.”

    Bull slumped in his chair, a chastened creature with curly hair and wounded pride. “Mary Ann’s gone,” he muttered, staring into middle distance as if mourning a lost lover.

    “At least there’s Jeannie,” I said.
    “Barbara Eden never lets you down,” he replied.
    “And Charlie’s Angels,” I added.

    Bull kept a poster of Farrah Fawcett in his room. Once a week, he arranged protein pills on a velvet pillow beneath it, as if offering tribute to a benevolent deity of blonde perfection.

    Reality intruded. His mother, unimpressed with his theatrical grief, demanded repayment for the damaged television. He had already failed a security job test at Gemco. He was supposed to run up a staircase while holding a fire extinguisher in fewer than fifteen seconds. He gave up midway, keeling over and trying to catch his breath.

    “What does it profit a man to have bulging muscles if he is not functional?” I asked.

    “Shut up, loser,” Bull snapped.

    He had rank—he and Falco were seniors; I was a sophomore with a loose mouth and poor instincts for hierarchy.

    Now, with a bandaged leg, he faced a new problem: no job, no training, no progress. Falco, ever the strategist, offered his usual solutions in single-word fragments.

    “Refrigeration.”
    “I failed that test three times.”
    “Take it again. Cold air builds muscle.”

    Bull shook his head. “Fifty bucks a test.”

    As always, we retreated into fantasy. We would win international bodybuilding titles, open a gym in the Bahamas, and spend our days in Speedos while sunlit goddesses delivered protein drinks in coconut shells and validated our existence. Bull embellished the vision with architectural details and swimsuit specifications. He looked almost peaceful.

    Which is why I had to ruin it.

    “And maybe,” I said, “while you’re selling memberships, you’ll run into Mary Ann.”

    “Shut up, loser,” he said again, clutching his leg.

    The pain had sharpened. Not just the injury—the realization. One impulsive kick had cost him weeks of training, a job opportunity, and delayed the imaginary migration to a tropical paradise where everything made sense and nothing required discipline.

    For the first time, Bull looked less like a future champion and more like what he was: a kid being forced to accept the fact that the Bahamas were postponed indefinitely. Accountability had arrived early. 

    Our concern for Bull evaporated the moment Sid Briggs burst through the ER turnstile, a spectacle wrapped in gauze and self-regard. His right hand was bandaged into a blunt white cudgel, as if he’d lost a fight with a plaster cast. The rest of him, however, was in peak exhibition form: cut-offs surgically trimmed, a white tank top clinging to a torso that glistened with oil. Whether he’d applied it before or after entering the ER was unclear, but the principle was not—Sid Briggs did not enter public space without proper lubrication. His neck carried enough gold chain and oversized pukka shells to suggest he had just taken first place in a luau dance-off, and he wore the prize with priestly seriousness.

    Sid’s hair was sun-bleached into submission, his mustache aggressively bushy, and his cheeks sucked inward, as if he were practicing for a portrait no one had commissioned. He looked pleased with himself in the way only a man can who has mistaken persistence for success.

    He recognized us and approached with theatrical urgency, holding up his bandaged hand like a prop. “Nasty bee sting,” he said, as if recounting a battlefield injury. He’d been tanning at Lake Don Castro when the incident occurred. The doctor, he reported, had warned him about a possible allergy: future stings could escalate, even turn life-threatening. 

    “The lake is a bee magnet,” I said.

    Briggs rolled his eyes at me with the practiced contempt of a man who has never allowed facts to interrupt his narrative.

    “As if I’m going to stop tanning at Don Castro,” he said. “That is my home, bro.”

    We laughed, not because it was funny, but because it was airtight. Sid Briggs without Don Castro would be like a peacock without a parking lot—technically possible, but existentially absurd. He lived there in spirit: beside the snack bar, beside his Playmate cooler, white Frisbee at the ready, launching pickup lines with the confidence of a man who believed rejection was a clerical error. Even now, the word “disco” conjures him for me—bronzed in Speedos, snapping his fingers to KC and the Sunshine Band as if rhythm itself were part of his personal brand.

    As he spoke, he sucked in his cheeks and scanned the room, locking onto a blonde nurse with the focus of a guided missile. “Well, amigos,” he said, adjusting his posture to maximum visibility, “I need to get back to the beach. The ladies are waiting.”

    He patted Bull on the shoulder—carefully, as if blessing a lesser mortal—wished him a speedy recovery, and strode back into the sunlight, a man convinced that even a bee sting was just another opportunity to be seen.

    ***

    About a month later, my bodybuilder buddies and I saw Sid in his usual spot, the grassy knoll, where he was tossing his Frisbee to two blonde girls in white bikinis. I had my towel spread out close by so I could study Sid’s methods among the drone of buzzing bees. I was half-listening to him talk about how amazing he was and half-reading my parents’ dog-eared copy of The Happy Hooker.

    That’s when I heard Sid give out an alarming howl.

    “Oh my God,” one of the bikini-clad girls said. “You stepped on a bee.”

    I saw the bee spinning in the grass for its final moments before it would die without its stinger.

    The bee sting’s effects were immediate. Sid began to sweat and limp while trying to walk through the pain. The two blonde girls looked at the wincing pick-up artist with concern. One of them asked if he was all right.

    “No big deal,” he said. “Just a little bee sting.”

    “Are you sure you’re okay?” one of the girls asked as the man’s body was covered with a shiny sheen of sweat.

    “I’m fine. Really, I am.”

    “I think you should sit down,” one of the girls said.

    “No, we can still play. I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.”

    By now, Sid’s foot had swollen into a giant ham. He looked down at the inflamed flesh, and his tumescent foot was proof of the severity of his situation. His eyes bulged with fear, and then he collapsed, and lying prone on his back he began to hyperventilate.

    An ambulance came soon after. Sid was in the throes of anaphylactic shock. The paramedics did their best, but Sid died on the spot.

    I was never the same after Sid died. The whole thing lodged inside me like a splinter beneath the skin. I obsessed over the details of his death with the unhealthy devotion usually reserved for unsolved murders and failed romances. I had nightmares. I stopped going to the beach with my buddies. The grassy knoll, the imported sand, the Frisbees arcing against the sky—all of it felt contaminated now, like the set of a sitcom where somebody had quietly died backstage.

    About six months after Sid’s death, a peculiar dream began visiting me with unnerving regularity.

    In the dream, my friends and I gathered at the lake at twilight for a wake. We sat around a bonfire drinking cheap beer while the last ribbons of orange light dissolved across the water. Then someone would fall silent and point toward the horizon.

    There was Sid.

    Far out on the lake, he appeared as a small silhouette walking across the water toward us with calm, impossible strides. No thunder cracked. No heavenly choir sang. He simply kept approaching, closer and closer, until he reached the shore, brushed lakewater from his pant legs, and sat beside the fire as casually as a man returning late to a barbecue.

    That was when he told us about his final moments.

    The paramedics were working frantically over his body, he explained, when suddenly he looked upward and saw the counterfactual version of his life—the life he might have lived had he not spent decades performing for strangers like a peacock drunk on its own feathers. In that vision he was no longer prowling the beach with pickup lines and fraudulent pedigrees. He was a husband. A father. He walked peacefully along the shoreline beside a woman who genuinely loved him. Four children orbited around them in bursts of laughter while two rescue dogs exploded through the surf in ecstatic loops.

    Everything glowed with an unbearable softness.

    The sky was pale blue, not dramatic enough for cinema but beautiful in the way honest things often are. Sunlight fell gently across the water as though the world itself had abandoned judgment. Somewhere in the distance there was music—not literal music, but the emotional equivalent of it, the kind that arrives when your nervous system finally unclenches after years of pretending.

    And in that impossible stillness, Sid turned toward God.

    Not toward status. Not toward women. Not toward applause. Toward God.

    He begged for another chance. He promised he would abandon the counterfeit life and live honestly at last. It was as if existence itself had paused to offer him one final rehearsal for redemption. For the first time in his life, he experienced something that required no performance whatsoever: peace stripped of vanity. Beauty without spectators.

    Then the bee venom reached his heart.

    That was the cruelty of it.

    Just as he believed grace had opened a door for him, his body failed. The bee won. Sid Briggs—master raconteur, counterfeit aristocrat, beach peacock, human smoke machine—died mid-negotiation with eternity.

    Around the bonfire, dream-Sid spoke to us without swagger, without embellishment, without the narcotic glaze of self-invention. He told us he was not a man to imitate but a cautionary tale with suntan oil on it. A fraud. An impostor. A man who had spent so much time manufacturing an image that he neglected the architecture of an actual soul.

    He made us swear we would not waste our lives chasing the same hollow performance.

    And once we promised him—once he was convinced we understood—he rose quietly from the fire, walked back across the water toward the horizon, and disappeared into the dark.

    A few years later, when I took music theory in college, I carried that dream with me to the piano. I tried to process Sid’s death the only way I knew how: by turning grief into melody. For nearly two years I worked obsessively on a composition called “The Ghost Story of Sid Briggs.”

    Almost fifty years later, I still play it.

    The notes have never dulled. Neither has the warning hidden inside them.

    Some performances do not end with applause or redemption. Some end with collapse. Too little truth. Too much theater. And no encore.

  • The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    The Case of the Mudman with Missing Multiband

    I bought a used Casio G-Shock G-9300 Mudman for $100, though I didn’t know that at the time. I thought I was buying its more sophisticated cousin—the Multiband-6 GW-9300—listed at $200. When the package arrived, the truth was stamped plainly on the caseback: G-9300. No atomic sync, no nightly communion with Colorado—just a solid, stubborn quartz soldier. My heart sank with the dull thud of a man who realizes he’s paid twice the price for half the feature set.

    I contacted the seller, assuming incompetence rather than malice. His inventory was 99% clothing; this was not a man who spent his evenings debating radio signal strength and solar charging rituals. I offered him a dignified exit: refund me $100 and I’ll keep the watch, or take it back for a full refund. His first move was to offer $80, which was optimistic in the way that a man hopes you won’t notice arithmetic. I declined gently and reiterated my willingness to return the watch. That sobered him. He apologized, agreed to refund the full $100, and we both avoided the bureaucratic headache of returns.

    I could have pressed harder. There’s always a way to extract a little more when the other party is off-balance. But squeezing a man who’s clearly trying to piece together a living from eBay listings feels less like savvy and more like moral corrosion. You squeeze out a few more dollars but lose your soul.

    In the end, I kept the watch, opened ChatGPT for a tutorial, and in two minutes had it set and behaving like the reliable instrument it is. No atomic precision, no midnight syncs—just time, ticking along with modest competence. The transaction, briefly absurd, resolved itself into something tolerable, even instructive. I paid for a mistake, corrected it, and walked away with a working watch and an untroubled conscience.

    Not every deal needs to be a conquest. Some are better as small acts of grace and kindness.

  • The Two Faces of Gasbaggery

    The Two Faces of Gasbaggery

    It should not surprise us that gasbaggery functions like a drug. The practiced gasbag does not merely speak; he performs sovereignty. He presents himself as a man plugged into the hidden circuitry of the world—wired to the grapevine, fluent in relevance, dispensing commentary as if it were intelligence. We listen, not because the content is profound, but because the delivery suggests mastery.

    And so we gravitate toward the gifted gossip—the one who narrates minor events with blockbuster urgency, who seasons every anecdote with scandal, who topples the famous with a flourish and hands us our daily ration of schadenfreude. It is theater masquerading as insight, and we applaud accordingly.

    To understand the appetite for this performance, we can turn to Blaise Pascal, who diagnosed the human condition with unnerving precision. He called it divertissement—our endless appetite for distraction. Not the crude kind, but the refined variety: light, engaging, socially acceptable diversions that keep the mind busy and the soul anesthetized. Divertissement fills the void. It spares us the burden of self-awareness. It keeps loneliness at bay and death politely out of frame.

    In the post-COVID world—where many people retreated into curated cocoons and allowed real friendships to atrophy—this appetite has metastasized. Podcasts proliferate like mold in a damp basement. There are now millions of them, each offering the same quiet illusion: that you are sitting at a table, coffee in hand, among friends. These hosts become stand-ins for relationships you no longer maintain. They chatter; you listen; the loneliness softens, if only slightly.

    If podcasts don’t suffice, there are the influencers—on YouTube, on TikTok—each one broadcasting intimacy on demand, each one inviting you into a simulated community of like-minded spectators, all gathered around the same flickering fire of curated personality. The opportunities for distraction are now effectively infinite.

    It is no wonder that a lifelong gasbag such as myself looks upon these operators with envy. Their reach flatters the ego. Their attention looks like proof. I fall easily into the childish arithmetic: visibility equals worth. The louder the voice, the greater the man. It is nonsense, of course, but it is persuasive nonsense.

    Pascal would not be impressed. He saw divertissement for what it is: a beautifully decorated trap. A man can spend his entire life wandering through these amusements, never arriving anywhere, mistaking motion for purpose. The reasons we fall for it are not flattering. Gasbaggery thrives in the soil of mediocrity—low stakes, endlessly renewable, socially rewarded. It keeps the mind in motion without requiring it to go anywhere. Like wheels spinning in mud, there is activity, but no progress.

    Worse, it flatters our vanity. Gossip diminishes others while quietly inflating ourselves. It signals belonging, earns status, and allows us to sit in judgment with all the authority of a man who has never examined his own defects. Hypocrisy, in this form, is not merely tolerated—it is enjoyable.

    And yet, not all gasbaggery is cheap.

    Some of it is priceless.

    I think of my father. I miss him. Some of my most vivid memories are of sitting at the dinner table long after the meal was finished, listening to his stories. They were extravagant, alive—tales of drunken nights in the army, of a long-forgotten relative who worked off his indenture in a mental institution, of strange fruits eaten in distant countries, of meals so exquisite he pitied the rest of humanity for never tasting them. He told these stories with such conviction that the room seemed to expand around them.

    There was also the night he was thrown out of a movie theater for laughing too loudly—laughing so hard he continued walking all the way home, alarming passing drivers who assumed they had encountered a madman.

    That was gasbaggery, too—but of a different order. It was not performance for status. It was connection. It was love, disguised as storytelling. It did not diminish others; it enlarged the room.

    This is the distinction that matters.

    There is the Pascalian gasbag—the gossiping scold, spinning endlessly in the mud of distraction and vanity. And there is the other kind—the storyteller who binds people together, who turns memory into something warm and enduring.

    If I must be a gasbag—and I must—I would prefer the latter.

    As a Verbosaurus Rex, I must know the two faces of gasbaggery and decide which one I’m willing to wear. 

  • I Am Verbosaurus Rex

    I Am Verbosaurus Rex

    At exactly 8:00 a.m.—as reliably as a Swiss watch with a Costco membership—I entered my Torrance Trader Joe’s, continuing a ritual that has endured since 2005. Fifteen minutes in, I found myself in the pasta sauce aisle beside two sisters in their sixties, both with jet-black hair and the alert posture of women who have seen things. Then it came: a disturbance from the frozen food aisle.

    At first, I told myself it was the usual retail banter—clerks sparring, voices raised in mock aggression, the choreography of workplace camaraderie. That illusion lasted about three seconds. The tone sharpened. The volume climbed. This was no jovial joust. This was a kerfuffle in its purest, most unrefined form—the kind of word baseball announcers used when fists replaced fastballs.

    The dialogue, once decipherable, repeated itself with the stubborn clarity of a broken record:
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    Again.
    “Stop coughing on the food.”
    “Mind your own business.”

    The sisters and I exchanged a look of shared alarm—the silent agreement that this was not the sort of morning theater one expects while contemplating marinara. Around us, employees formed small, murmuring clusters, like villagers sensing a storm that rarely visits their town.

    I never saw the alleged cougher—the phantom menace—but I did see his accuser. He entered our aisle still simmering, muttering fragments of outrage like a man replaying his own highlight reel. He was a bodybuilder in his late twenties, performing that unmistakable gait: the lat-spread strut, shoulders flared as if perpetually stepping onstage. He carried a bag in each hand like ceremonial weights. Gray sweatpants. Turquoise T-shirt emblazoned with the word “Strong,” as if to remove all ambiguity.

    The shirt was soaked through, suggesting a recent campaign at the nearby UFC gym. He had not yet exited warrior mode. His face attempted a look of righteous fury, but it flickered—betrayed by the faintest hint of self-awareness. The room was not applauding. It was recoiling. The performance of dominance had misfired, and in its place lingered something less heroic: the spectacle of a man who had mistaken volume for authority and muscle for gravitas.

    For a moment, I caught a trace of chagrin in his expression, like a balloon losing air in slow motion. Still, he clung to a hardened stare, perhaps hoping to salvage dignity from the wreckage.

    As for me, I became invisible. I adopted the ancient survival tactic of the grocery store: benign neutrality. Eyes forward. No recognition. No acknowledgment. The last thing I needed was to be drafted into this man’s private war.

    At checkout, as the affable clerk scanned my items with the serenity of someone blissfully unaware of the morning’s drama, I felt the urge to recount the scene. It had all the ingredients of a fine anecdote—conflict, absurdity, a man yelling about respiratory etiquette in the frozen aisle. But I hesitated. The bodybuilder might still be somewhere in the store, prowling, listening, ready to defend his honor against anyone who dared narrate it.

    Perhaps next week, I’ll tell the story. Though by then, in a place like Trader Joe’s, the tale will have already spread—whispered from aisle to aisle, passed between cashiers, and filed away as one of those rare moments when civility briefly cracked, and the frozen peas bore witness.

    My opportunity to tell the story would be wasted because it would be old gossip by then. 

    I walked out of Trader Joe’s pushing ten canvas sacks of groceries and a quiet resentment: I was not the man who got to tell the story of the raging bodybuilder. That distinction had slipped through my fingers, and the loss exposed something less flattering than disappointment. It exposed me as a gasbag—a man who doesn’t merely enter a room but attempts to annex it, to colonize the airspace with stories, gossip, and one-man comedy routines delivered with the full-body enthusiasm of a failed vaudevillian.

    I don’t just want to tell a story. I want to stage it. I want gestures, timing, voice modulation—the whole theatrical apparatus. I want to leave scorch marks on the memory of my audience, to become, if only for a moment, the most vivid thing that has ever happened to them. Not a storyteller, but an event. Not a man, but a headline.

    Which is to say: I am Verbosaurus Rex. I am a  conversational apex predator that survives by devouring silence and leaving behind a trail of exhausted listeners. I do not speak so much as expand, inflating every passing thought into a full-bodied monologue with the confidence of a man who believes the room has been waiting all day for my commentary. Questions are merely launchpads, pauses are tactical errors, and other people’s sentences are polite suggestions to be overrun. The Verbosaur, such as myself, does not intend harm; I simply cannot imagine a world in which less of me would be an improvement.

    And that impulse, when examined in sober light, looks less like charisma and more like hunger. Primitive man told stories around the fire to make sense of the world and to warn others about the tiger in the tall grass. I, on the other hand, seem to be reenacting Barnum & Bailey in the produce aisle, hoping that if I juggle enough words and land enough laughs, I might briefly convince myself that I matter.

    As a Verbosaur, I resemble the great, haunted figure of Larry Sanders—the talk show host who, after basking in the glow of studio applause, goes home to watch himself on television, scanning his own performance for proof that he was enough, and finding, with grim consistency, that he was not.