Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • How to Visualize Your Higher Self and Be a Fool at the Same Time

    How to Visualize Your Higher Self and Be a Fool at the Same Time

    By late morning at Canyon High, you had taken sanctuary in the Student Lounge—a sacred space masquerading as a study haven but better known for Olympic-level loafing and social maneuvering. Lined with shelves of crusty dictionaries and guarded by Mrs. Stinson at her post like a sloth in bifocals, the real action was found at the cushy couches. That’s where Paper Football reigned supreme: a sport that turned scrap paper into pigskin gold. Flick the triangle across the table. Let it hang off the edge—touchdown. Launch it between your opponent’s outstretched fingers—extra point. You figured ninety percent of student productivity was lost to this noble art.

    You were flopped on an orange couch, thumbing through Nectar in a Sieve, trying to survive its soul-crushing tour of starvation and sorrow, when your survival instincts kicked in. You swapped it out for a bodybuilding magazine. Surely a glimpse of sculpted abs and hypertrophic deltoids could rescue your psyche.

    That’s when Liz Murphy appeared—red hair blazing like a warning flare. Wearing a ketchup-colored tee and jeans, she plopped down beside you with the kind of energy that should be illegal before noon.

    “What are you reading?” she asked, peering at the magazine.

    “Article on Robbie Robinson. Some say his biceps peak is the best in history,” you said, delivering it with the gravitas of a man discussing global diplomacy.

    She raised an eyebrow at the photo. “You want to look like that?”

    “That’s the plan,” you said, puffing your chest with delusional pride.

    She squeezed your bicep. “I think you look perfect just the way you are.”

    “Perfect if you’re into track runners,” you said, trying to hide behind self-deprecating cool.

    Mrs. Stinson glared at the two of you from her help desk, her eyes sharp enough to etch disapproval into stone. You buried your nose in Robbie’s glistening biceps and pretended to read.

    Liz, undeterred, asked, “You seriously want to look like that?”

    “My goal,” you declared, slipping into motivational speaker mode, “is to become Mr. Universe, then open a gym in the Bahamas.”

    As the words exited your mouth, you immediately regretted them. But Liz didn’t blink.

    “That’s so cool. You’re only fourteen and already have goals.”

    “It’s called the Creative Visualization Principle,” you explained, summoning a vaguely authoritative tone. “You visualize your higher self, then manifest.”

    “Where’d you read that?”

    “My mom’s self-help books… or maybe one of these mags. I can’t remember.”

    “You crack me up,” she said, smiling.

    Then came your confession. “Liz, I did something gross. You might hate me.”

    “I doubt it,” she said, intrigued.

    You took a breath. “First day of school, I showed you a picture in that book. Said it was me hanging upside down on a chin-up bar.”

    “Yeah?”

    “It wasn’t me. I made it up. Just flat-out lied.”

    “Why?”

    “I don’t know. I wanted to impress you, I guess. And I’ve felt like a fraud ever since.”

    “I don’t hate you,” she said, calm and kind. “You were nervous. It’s not the end of the world.”

    You didn’t know what to say, so you nodded.

    After a pause, she asked, “There’s a dance Friday night.”

    You nodded again, unsure where this was going.

    “You going?”

    “Didn’t plan on it.”

    “Why not?”

    “I don’t like shaking my butt in public.”

    “If you go, I’ll slow dance with you. First dance—promise?”

    “Yeah,” you said, barely breathing. “Promise.”

    And just like that, your Friday night was rewritten by the girl you once lied to—and who somehow still wanted to be your first dance.

  • Lies, Lats, and Literature Class

    Lies, Lats, and Literature Class

    You had Pumping Iron sprawled on your desk like a sacred text while the Canyon High freshmen trickled into Mrs. Hanson’s English Literature class, each one a fidgeting, hormonal catastrophe. Glossy black-and-white photos of muscle-bound gods glared back at you from the pages, but it was the image of Mr. Universe Franco Columbu, hanging upside down from a chin-up bar like a meaty bat, that you kept flipping to. The photo was blurry and distant—just obscure enough that only a true disciple of the iron church could identify Columbu.

    Next to you sat Liz Murphy. Just last year, she was the gangly volleyball phenom from Earl Warren Junior High—the one the boys nicknamed “Giraffe,” “Horse,” or “Armadillo,” depending on the angle of cruelty. But over the summer, Liz had staged a Cinderella comeback. A Caribbean cruise had transformed her: her freckles softened into a copper glow, her limbs filled out like poetry, and her hair—now longer and looser—carried the faint scent of strawberries and ginger.

    You turned to her and said, “Hey, wanna see a picture of a bodybuilder at the beach?”

    She gave you a skeptical smile and leaned in.

    “See that guy hanging upside down?” you said, pointing at the photograph.

    “Holy smokes, he’s huge,” she said, staring wide-eyed.

    “That’s me,” you replied.

    She squinted, confused. “What?”

    “That’s me. Can’t you tell?”

    Her disbelief cracked just enough for hope to sneak in. “Oh my God… that’s you?”

    You nodded with solemn authority. “Yep.”

    And just like that, you slipped into your own fiction. You told her how you’d been visiting your grandparents in Los Angeles, hanging out with your bodybuilding pals at the beach, when someone snapped the photo. The lie came easy. Too easy. Her awe washed over you like warm sun, and for a few precious seconds, you felt seen. Not as the skinny kid you were—but as the chiseled hero you wanted to be.

    But then came the stomach-drop. The gnawing guilt. What kind of person, even at fourteen, spins a story so absurd just to taste a few seconds of admiration? You didn’t know. But if you had to trace it back—to find the origin of the myth-making—you might start in the treehouse of your childhood, the one where humiliation planted its flag and never truly left.

  • The Unwritten Rules of the Iron Temple (and How You Broke Them All)

    The Unwritten Rules of the Iron Temple (and How You Broke Them All)

    One of the twisted pleasures of training at Walt’s Gym in the mid-70s was sweating it out beside the Big Time Wrestling stars you once watched religiously after school on Channel 44. For two straight years, those hulking, cartoonish men had been etched into your imagination, and suddenly—there they were, no longer trapped in your Zenith TV, but flesh-and-blood titans grunting beside you as you tried to make a name for yourself as a thirteen-year-old Olympic weightlifter.

    You couldn’t believe your luck. Kinji Shibuya, Pedro Morales, Hector Cruz—icons of your adolescent screen time were now regulars at your crusty little training temple. But with awe came idiocy. You were built for your age, sure, but common sense hadn’t caught up to your biceps.

    Take the time you ran cable lat rows next to Hector Cruz. Somewhere between rep six and seven, you decided to open your mouth and muse aloud whether wrestling—dare you say it—might be fake. Cruz turned, his forehead looking like tectonic plates mid-quake, and fixed you with a death glare. “Look at these scars on my face! Do they look fake to you?” he growled. You nodded dumbly, suddenly aware that your joke had been the conversational equivalent of lighting yourself on fire.

    Then came Towelgate. You spotted a sweat towel draped across the calf machine and figured, hey, free towel. You wiped your pubescent brow and basked in your temporary coolness—until a mountain of muscle barreled off the bench press and accused you of theft. With twitching biceps and a voice that rumbled like thunder, he threatened to rearrange your face if you ever touched his towel again. That was the day you learned: gym towels are sacred. More sacred than communion wafers. More sacred than your own dignity.

    But nothing topped the screaming incident. You thought your loud, primal grunts gave your lifts an air of badassery. They didn’t. One day, a competitive bodybuilder who looked like an enraged Renaissance statue cornered you between sets and snarled, “Kid, if you don’t cut the screaming, someone’s going to shut you up permanently. And they’ll get a standing ovation for it.”

    That was your education. Walt’s Gym wasn’t just about the weight on the bar. It was about knowing the tribal codes, reading the room, and shutting the hell up before your next breath became your last. You didn’t just lift—you survived. And sometimes, that was the heavier feat.

  • False Prophets with Great Abs

    False Prophets with Great Abs

    You remembered the first episode of I Dream of Jeannie. Major Tony Nelson—square-jawed astronaut, man of science—crash-landed on a remote island after his space capsule, Stardust One, veered off course. There, buried in the sand like a cursed treasure, he found a mysterious bottle. And then—whoosh—a plume of bluish vapor, and out popped Jeannie: blonde, barefoot, bewitching, and hell-bent on fulfilling his every wish. Tony blinked. Maybe it was a hallucination. Maybe his oxygen-deprived brain was conjuring fantasies. Whatever the case, he wasn’t buying it. He was trained to distrust magical thinking, and Jeannie, glittering and obedient, was the definition of a dangerous shortcut.

    You, on the other hand, were no Tony Nelson. You were a teenage Olympic weightlifter and amateur bodybuilder, sprawled out in your bedroom flipping through a muscle magazine, fully hypnotized by the promise of the next miracle breakthrough. You had just finished an article on “progressive resistance training”—a phrase that gave you a warm little shiver of purpose. You divided the world into two kinds of people: those who were progressing and those who were stagnating in mediocrity. You were dead-set on being in the first camp.

    The article ended, but the real magic was in the ads: potions, powders, pulleys, and contraptions promising titanic biceps, superhuman abs, and the sculpted torso of a Greek statue. One ad hit you right in the hypothalamus—the Bullworker. A three-foot rod of steel and plastic, with green-handled grips and bowstring cables. It looked like a cross between a medieval torture device and a Jedi weapon. A bodybuilder in the ad flexed beside it, veins like roadmaps and pecs like dinner plates. It cost forty-five bucks—a king’s ransom. You had to have it.

    So you marched into the living room where your dad was nursing a beer and watching football. You handed him the ad.

    “What do you think?”

    Your dad—a flinty ex-infantryman with a buzz cut, a jaw like a chisel, and a fading “MICHAEL” tattoo on his biceps—glanced at the page like it was a bar tab he didn’t remember running up. “You want muscles?” he said. “Pull weeds. Mow the lawn. Clean gutters. Chop wood.”

    “Dad, I’m serious. This would supplement my real workouts.”

    He looked again, then sighed. “It’s junk. Slick marketing. But if you want to waste your allowance, it’s your choice.”

    You told him you were short on cash.

    “Then save up. Make sacrifices. And do your research. If you dig a little deeper, I bet you’ll want it less.”

    “Why?”

    “Haven’t you heard of Sturgeon’s Law?”

    “No.”

    “Ninety-nine percent of everything is bullshit. That includes this gadget. Remember that martial arts program you ordered? Twenty bucks for a pamphlet with stick figures doing karate poses. Bullshit. Due diligence, son—that’s your shield.”

    “What’s due diligence?”

    “Thorough investigation. Weighing the pros and cons. Kicking the tires before you buy the clunker. Most things don’t survive scrutiny. Always be quick to save your money and slow to spend it. You got that?”

    “Yes, Dad.”

    Not exactly in the mood for football after that, you trudged back to your room and cracked open another muscle magazine, drinking in the endless parade of promises. “Gain more muscle than you ever dreamed of,” one ad proclaimed.

    And Jeannie was back. Not in her bottle—she was in your brain now. She was the fantasy of every easy answer, every too-good-to-be-true claim. The allure of Jeannie wasn’t just her beauty or her servility—it was her offer of instant gratification, with no price tag except your dignity.

    That was the whole premise of the show: Tony Nelson didn’t trust Jeannie because he was smart enough to know that panaceas always come with fine print. But you weren’t that smart yet. You still believed—just a little—that this or that device, powder, or program might turn you into a demigod.

    You wanted your gains. 

    The Bullworker failed you–but it wasn’t just a piece of overpriced cable-tension nonsense. It was a monument to your teenage fantasy: that somewhere, somehow, a portable contraption could carve you into Hercules without the burden of sweat, setbacks, or iron plates. The device itself was a dud—a clunky plastic rod with big promises and no payoff—but the idea of the Bullworker had teeth. A chiseled physique, ready to go, no gym required? It was the dream distilled. What you got instead was a hard truth: even when an idea crashes and burns in practice, some illusions are simply too seductive to abandon.

  • Charlie the Frog at the Temple of Gains

    Charlie the Frog at the Temple of Gains

    By the time you hit fourteen, your sacred sanctuary wasn’t some air-conditioned suburban rec center with eucalyptus towels and Wi-Fi. No, your Mecca was Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California—a rusting cathedral of iron that began life as a chicken coop in the 1950s and never quite shook the poultry vibe. This was not a gym—it was a festering biome of bacteria and dreams, a living organism teeming with unclassified fungi, incurable athlete’s foot, and possibly several sentient strains of black mold. Members spoke of a frog named Charlie who allegedly roosted in the shower stalls—a fat, warty mascot celebrated by the resident pro wrestlers. You never saw Charlie, but you believed. In a place like this, hallucinations could be considered part of the membership plan.

    The locker room? It doubled as a noir film set. Every day, you’d see some bankrupt divorcé in a velour tracksuit and a ship-anchor gold chain, chained to the payphone like it was his last lifeline, ranting to his lawyer about alimony, DUIs, or some tragic time-share dispute in Reno. You listened in. How could you not?

    Out back was a pool—or what used to be a pool. Now it was a soup of moss, dead rats, and unspeakable broth. Walt himself, the gym’s proprietor and part-time pest undertaker, would emerge every so often with a pool skimmer, fish out some bloated rodent corpse, and hold it aloft like it was Simba on Pride Rock. The regulars would cheer. Walt would bow. Then he’d fling the cadaver into the dumpster like he was doing Shakespeare in the Parking Lot.

    Inside, the circus only expanded. You had Wally—an ancient gym relic who claimed to be the anatomical model for some early caveman medical scroll. He’d been there since Eisenhower, possibly since the Carboniferous Period. Wally was a fixture. He corrected your form whether you asked or not. He’d bench the bar, monologue about arthritis, and tell sweeping tales of deadbeat cousins, glamorous ex-lovers, and Eisenhower’s America. His workouts lasted longer than most wars. And when he was done, he’d vanish into the sauna, then reemerge drenched in talcum powder like a ghost summoned by a seance in a health spa. You often thought a foghorn would erupt every time he crossed your field of vision.

    The soundtrack of this chaos? The gym’s radio had a three-song memory: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship.” These songs looped like some cosmic punishment for crimes you hadn’t yet committed. Yet somehow, they became the anthem of your adolescence.

    And you were the perfect age—old enough to build biceps, too young to pay taxes. You didn’t know what a mortgage was, but you knew how to crank out supersets. While grown men wept about tuition and liver spots, you were curling barbells and escaping into bliss. The gym wasn’t just a place—it was your church, your escape hatch, your sweaty Shangri-La.

    As Arnold wrote in The Education of a Bodybuilder, the gym was where it all clicked. You felt it too—that moment of transcendence, when iron became religion and sweat became baptism. For you, that epiphany happened in the rot-ridden, bacteria-flecked walls of Walt’s Gym, 1976 edition. A paradise of tetanus and testosterone. A perfect hellhole. The best place on Earth.

  • The Gospel According to Arnold

    The Gospel According to Arnold

    At thirteen, you weren’t just growing—you were bulking. You launched yourself headfirst into the gladiatorial quest for muscle supremacy, wolfing down 200 grams of protein a day in four frenzied “feedings,” as if you were a ravenous prehistoric beast on a cutting-edge strength cycle. While other kids were figuring out how to talk to girls without combusting from nerves, you were busy calculating amino acid ratios and chasing the elusive state of protein-muscle synthesis like it was the Holy Grail.

    Your kitchen became a makeshift laboratory of gains. You blended protein shakes with powders hawked by the beefy prophets in Strength and Health magazine—chalky concoctions that tasted like regret mixed with drywall. You drank them anyway. Satiety was sacred.

    After a year of racking up Junior Olympic Weightlifting trophies—hoisting iron like a Cold War super-soldier on state-sponsored hormones—your well-meaning mother tried to support your calling. On your fourteenth birthday, she handed you what you assumed would be a Soviet-tier weightlifting manual. Instead, it was Pumping Iron—a glossy coffee-table tome filled with baby-oiled men in banana hammocks. Bodybuilders. Flexing. Posing. Pouting.

    You had to sit her down.

    “Mom,” you said, as diplomatically as a hormonal adolescent can, “weightlifters move heavy things. Bodybuilders pose in sequined underwear and shave their armpits.”

    To you, weightlifters were Spartans. Bodybuilders were Vegas lounge acts with glutes.

    Still, curiosity got the better of you. You flipped through Pumping Iron with a mixture of revulsion and wonder. The men on those pages didn’t look human. They looked like sculptures that got bored and decided to bench press.

    You imagined them living in their parents’ houses, drinking protein sludge while their heat-addled mothers babbled to parakeets and dabbed their foreheads with cold washcloths. They were carnival beasts. You, however, were a noble practitioner of Olympic Weightlifting—a sport so pure it belonged in the actual Olympics, unlike the oiled-up beauty pageants you now held in low regard.

    Your hero was Vasily Alekseyev, the 350-pound Russian colossus who looked like he ate livestock for brunch. You watched him waddle onto the platform, glare at a loaded barbell like it owed him money, and launch it overhead like a man tossing furniture in a domestic dispute. When that barbell hit the floor, it echoed through your ribcage. That, you told yourself, was true strength.

    But then… Arnold happened.

    You’d seen him before, sure. But when you saw Pumping Iron—saw him—something shifted. It wasn’t just admiration. It was conversion. Arnold wasn’t a man. He was a solar flare with biceps. A deity with an accent.

    Soon, you were hanging around Walt’s Gym, where the walls smelled like testosterone and chalk dust, and where the guys wore cutoffs like they were Roman togas. One afternoon, you spotted a bodybuilder straight out of central casting: a tall, tanned fireman who had just placed in the Mr. California competition. Blond hair, thick broom-handle mustache, horn-rimmed glasses that screamed “Clark Kent just deadlifted a Buick.”

    He bench-pressed over 300 pounds, stood up, and stared into the mirror like Narcissus on creatine. “The first time I saw Arnold,” he said with reverence, “I felt I was in the presence of the Lord. I said to myself, ‘There stands the Messiah. There stands God Almighty, come to bring good cheer to this world.’”

    And you believed him.

    Because Arnold wasn’t just jacked—he was divine. He was the Pied Piper of Pecs, leading you out of your ordinary life and into a new religion: Bodybuilding Fever. There was no vaccine. No mercy. Just the cure: protein shakes, gym mirrors, and relentless flexing.

    You no longer lifted just to be strong. You lifted to be seen. To be admired. To become an icon. You drank from the sacred chalice of the dumbbell and chased the gleam of your own reflection. You weren’t just lifting—you were becoming.

  • Curling Ashtrays and Other Signs You’re Destined for Muscle Madness

    Curling Ashtrays and Other Signs You’re Destined for Muscle Madness

    Long before you were twelve and dominating Olympic lifts, before you sculpted yourself into a fourteen-year-old bodybuilder, the signs were there—you were already bitten by the iron bug. Every fiber of your being was obsessed with getting huge. You found strange inspiration in the unlikeliest of places: television commercials for dog food. Yes, dog food. Those ads were less about pets and more about performance enhancement in your impressionable, muscle-hungry brain.

    Gaines-Burgers looked like prime cuts straight from Mount Olympus. Gravy Train’s magical transformation from dry nuggets to savory stew made your jaw drop. If this stuff could pump a German Shepherd into a jacked beast, what was stopping you from sampling the ambrosia yourself?

    So you did what any logic-defying, delusional muscle aspirant would do: you marched up to your dad and declared—with all the conviction of a beagle spotting a squirrel—that you wanted to become a dog. Not metaphorically. Literally. That way, you could indulge in the canine cuisine of champions. Your father’s face went on a journey: confusion, horror, resignation. He’d seen a lot, but this—this was a new low.

    In a desperate act of culinary intervention, he took you to a local bistro and ordered you a French Dip with au jus, hoping that real food might reroute your deranged protein fantasies. The sandwich arrived, dripping in savory decadence. Your dad leaned in, eyebrows raised, voice tense with hope: “So, how do you like your French Dip?”

    You took a bite. Heaven. Your taste buds erupted like fireworks. And then—of course—you growled, dropped to all fours, and scratched at an imaginary flea with your hind leg, fully committing to the bit. Patrons stared. Your dad’s face turned a shade of red that Sherwin-Williams has yet to name. He looked like a man reevaluating every life decision he’d ever made.

    But you didn’t stop there. No, your devotion to hypertrophy was a full-spectrum obsession. You judged cereals by their muscle-building mascots. Quisp and Quake tasted the same, but you knew who the real hero was: Quake, the barrel-chested, pickaxe-wielding coal miner with a neck like a bridge cable. Quisp? A pencil-neck Martian who probably couldn’t curl a paperclip.

    So when those two faced off in the ultimate cereal showdown, you pledged allegiance to Team Quake. Those gear-shaped nuggets were more than breakfast—they were barbell fuel. Quisp’s saucer-shaped flakes turned to mush in milk faster than your patience at a shopping mall. Quake stood firm, stoic in the milky battlefield of your bowl.

    But then, disaster. America chose the Martian. Quake vanished. It wasn’t just a marketing decision—it was a betrayal. When Quake was discontinued, a part of your soul died. The cereal aisle became a graveyard of broken promises. Eating Quisp felt like betrayal. Worse: it felt like surrender. You imagined Quake crying out from some cereal Valhalla, mourned like a fallen hero.

    Still, the signs of your bodybuilding destiny didn’t end with cereal or dog food. They were everywhere. In your living room sat a ceramic ashtray the size of a manhole cover—your parents’ nicotine shrine. During The Incredible Hulk cartoons, you’d curl that ashtray like you were training for the Strongest Kid on Earth competition. It was your first dumbbell, your sacred relic of strength.

    Family vacations? Gymless wastelands. But you adapted. You curled suitcases, hoisted skillets, deadlifted detergent bottles, and pressed soup cans with religious fervor. You squatted potato sacks and benched dictionaries. Hotel staff stared. Your family sighed. You called it training.

    Eventually, you found a real gym. Barbells. Plates. Chalk. Grunts. It was everything you dreamed of. Your transformation from kitchen utensil lifter to iron disciple was complete. You weren’t just a bodybuilder in the making—you were a walking comic book origin story, forged in dog food commercials, French Dip delusions, and cereal-fueled vengeance.

  • The Gospel of Squats

    The Gospel of Squats

    In seventh grade, while your father was off playing superhero in the Peace Corps—presumably saving the world one mosquito net at a time—you were marooned in Nairobi, Kenya. Your days were spent juggling soccer balls with local kids whose knees seemed invincible, bonding with mood-swinging chameleons, and trying to convince yourself that your Action Man dolls (the British knockoff of G.I. Joe) were more than just inert plastic with bad articulation. When the dolls failed to deliver, you escaped into glossy American sports magazines, fantasizing about transforming your spaghetti frame into the hulking majesty of Reggie Jackson or Greg Luzinski. You didn’t realize it yet, but you were becoming a social alien—an unintentional exile from your former Bay Area self, the human equivalent of a chameleon stuck on a disco strobe.

    Coming back to California in 1974 to attend Earl Warren Junior High felt like being dropped into a strange new planet where bad perms and bell-bottoms were considered high fashion. When kids talked about “doobies,” you imagined something slimy from the ocean depths, and “bong” sounded like an unfortunate percussion instrument. Naturally, you said all this out loud. Your classmates—high-functioning experts in pot, Zeppelin, and humiliation—saw you for what you were: a clueless alien with a warped pop culture radar. “This kid thinks a bong is a wind chime” became your unofficial welcome-back slogan.

    Enter Lou Kruk, your P.E. teacher: part demigod, part drill sergeant, part Baywatch extra. He stood over six feet tall with the torso of an ice cream cone, mahogany tan legs bursting out of gym shorts so tight they could’ve been airbrushed. His lion-like hair, aviator sunglasses, and windbreakers gave him the aura of a man who taught dodgeball by day and raced Porsches by night. He did, in fact, drive a Porsche. He also owned a sailboat. And his girlfriend looked like a magazine ad for champagne and yacht clubs.

    Kruk’s voice thundered like Wolfman Jack having a meltdown, and he blasted Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass while ordering you to deadlift your body weight. During one rope climb session in the cafeteria, he interrupted class to verbally annihilate a group of bullies with a monologue worthy of a Greek tragedy. “He’s already in the gutter! You want to put your boot on his head too?” The bullies melted. You, meanwhile, silently vowed to name your first child Lou.

    On day one of Olympic Weightlifting, Kruk preached the gospel of the front squat. Feet flat, butt to the floor—no exceptions, no mercy. You took this commandment personally. You practiced until your glutes sang hymns of soreness. Your squats got so deep they could’ve hit oil. And when Kruk pointed to you as the Platonic ideal of squat form, the gym practically knelt.

    Eventually, you were powering through front squats with 200 pounds like they were grocery bags. The day you nailed a dozen reps at 225, the entire gym went silent. You weren’t lifting; you were levitating. Your thighs bloomed into grotesque botanical wonders. 

    Soon, you were squatting everywhere. At your locker. In algebra. As goalie during PE soccer games (to your teammates’ horror, as balls flew by into the net). You became known as “Squats,” and also “Thunder Thighs,” titles you wore like medals pinned to your hypertrophic quads. You didn’t care about ridicule anymore. You were a squat apostle, a zealot for quad dominance in the 148-pound class, where you snatched and clean-and-jerked like an adolescent Hercules hopped up on whey and divine purpose.

    You basked in Kruk’s approval like a reptile soaking up solar validation. His nods, his booming laughter—they were your sacraments. You became an unsolicited preacher, spreading the word of the front squat like a sidewalk prophet. For you, the squat wasn’t just exercise. It was theology. It was identity. It was the key to everything: confidence, masculinity, self-worth. Every rep was a sermon. Every deep descent into the squat rack brought you closer to the divine.

  • Hulk Couture: The Fashion Crimes of a Musclebound Child

    Hulk Couture: The Fashion Crimes of a Musclebound Child

    Whether you admit it or not, a part of you still wants to Hulk out like a fever-dream escapee from a 1970s television set. Watching the gentle, tortured soul of Bill Bixby morph into Lou Ferrigno’s snarling green colossus wasn’t just entertainment—it was therapy without the deductible. You didn’t want to trudge through life as a tightly wound ball of quiet despair. No, you wanted to erupt, transcend, and become an unstoppable force against loud chewers, bullies, and the guy curling in the squat rack.

    As a budding bodybuilder, you didn’t need gamma rays—just iron. And lots of it. Your transformation wasn’t just about building muscle; it was a sartorial revolution. You hacked off your sweatshirt sleeves, butchered the legs of your sweatpants, and stomped through the gym like a deranged fashion anarchist. You weren’t lifting weights—you were channeling rage into reps, morphing into a DIY Hulk with every guttural breath and dripping bead of sweat.

    But your Hulk obsession started long before puberty. You were a pint-sized fanatic, glued to the 1960s cartoon version of the green juggernaut. What captivated you most was the metamorphosis: how Bruce Banner’s clothes tore away, leaving only ragged dignity and raw power. So one fateful Saturday morning, with a level of creative genius only a six-year-old could summon, you took a brand-new pair of slacks from Mayberry’s and turned them into Hulk couture—frayed, slashed, and ruined. Then you stomped into your parents’ bedroom flexing, growling, “HULK SMASH!” Lucky for you, your mother’s laughter outweighed her rage.

    This was your first known case of Ferrigno Fever: the compulsive need to emulate Lou Ferrigno’s Hulk physique and fashion sense, typically culminating in destroyed clothing and inflated delusions of grandeur.

    As a teenager, your obsession graduated to the live-action Incredible Hulk. After the chaos subsided and Ferrigno’s beast melted back into Bixby’s sorrowful wanderer, you were left with “The Lonely Man Theme”—Joe Harnell’s melancholic piano elegy—as your personal anthem. It became the soundtrack to your self-pity and your deeply misguided belief that the world had wronged you by not immediately recognizing your divine potential.

    You weren’t just lifting at the gym; you were sculpting a mythic figure, trapped in a fluorescent-lit purgatory of men who looked like overripe tomatoes with toothpick limbs. They didn’t understand. They didn’t see the epic. But you did. You were a tragic hero, a lone star bench-pressing against the gravity of a cruel, indifferent world.

    Eventually, you realized that self-pity is seductive—like opium, but cheaper and twice as cringe. It whispers lies, paints you the tragic lead in a play no one else is watching, and delays the actual work of growing up. It took years, maybe decades, to hush that voice. But for a long time, the Hulk was your muse, your fashion icon, and your excuse.

  • Captain America vs. the Aryan Poster Child

    Captain America vs. the Aryan Poster Child

    On dry land, you were Captain America incarnate—at least in your own mind. A five-year-old freedom fighter in light-up sneakers, flexing your spaghetti arms to vanquish Red Skull stand-ins wherever they lurked. And in 1973, Kindergarten was your battlefield. The enemy? A kid named Teddy Heinrich, your neighbor at the Royal Lanai Apartments in San Jose—a cherubic little stormtrooper-in-training who strutted around with the smugness of a pint-sized Aryan poster child.

    You had no idea you were Jewish, not consciously. But Teddy sure did. He made it his mission to educate you—mostly through Nazi memorabilia and unsolicited history lessons delivered between episodes of The Three Stooges and Superman, which you watched on his living room TV because your family didn’t have UHF. His parents were phantoms—always cloistered in the master bedroom, never cracking a smile, and dressed like they were auditioning for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari.

    One day, Teddy gave you the grand tour of his family’s closet. Instead of a vacuum or winter coats, he pulled out his grandfather’s SS uniform—complete with a swastika armband, as if he were unveiling a treasured heirloom. “Check it out,” he said, beaming. “The greatest fighting machine the world has ever known.” His father peeked out from the shadows, nodded with ghostly approval, and slithered back into the bedroom.

    You didn’t know what to make of it. Your Nazi education came exclusively from The Sound of Music, and even then, the swastikas were mostly an inconvenience to the yodeling.

    Days later, under the hot California sun, you and Teddy were sprawled on the apartment lawn. He used his magnifying glass to torch a grotesque Jerusalem cricket, its alien limbs writhing in agony. You kicked it away, trying to save the poor thing, but Teddy doubled down—burning swastikas and “Nazi” into a wood block like a miniature war criminal with a hobby.

    You started mimicking him, doodling swastikas like a deranged architect. When your mother caught you mid-sketch, she froze. “Where did you learn that?” You dropped Teddy’s name like a hot grenade.

    She banned the symbols and told you they were evil. You nodded, swore to behave—and went right back to etching them at school, seduced by their sinister geometry.

    Then came the day Teddy called you a “dumb Jew.”

    You didn’t even know what the word meant. You just knew something flared in your chest like a lit fuse. In an instant, you were on top of him, pounding his freckled face into the grass. He didn’t fight back. He just took it—limp, passive, stunned. You clawed at his cheeks, turned them into raw hamburger. It was an out-of-body experience. You were rage. You were justice. You were five years old and seeing red.

    You walked home calm, maybe even proud. An hour later, Teddy and his mother showed up at your door. She was full of righteous German fury. “Your son did this?” she said, pushing her bruised child forward like Exhibit A. “I almost had to take him to the hospital.”

    Your mother, stunned, sent you to the kitchen. You listened from the other room as she said, “Did he really do all this?”

    “Yes!” the woman barked. “Your son should not be allowed to play with mine anymore.”

    Once they left, your mother turned to you. You explained the swastikas. The Nazi closet. The slur.

    She didn’t ground you. She didn’t raise her voice. Instead, she nodded with a quiet, ancestral gravity—as if somewhere in the back of her mind, ghosts had nodded with her.

    In her eyes, you weren’t a delinquent.

    You were Captain America.