Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Lessons Learned from the Ring Light Apocalypse

    Lessons Learned from the Ring Light Apocalypse

    During lockdown, I never saw my wife more wrung out, more spiritually flattened, than the months her middle school forced her into the digital gladiator pit of live Zoom instruction. Every weekday morning, she stood before a pair of glaring monitors like a soldier manning twin turrets. At her feet, the giant ring light—a luminous, tripod-legged parasite—waited patiently to stub toes and sabotage serenity. It wasn’t just a lighting fixture; it was a metaphor for the pandemic’s unwanted intrusion into every square inch of our domestic life.

    My wife’s battle didn’t end with her students. She also took it upon herself to launch our twin daughters, then fifth-graders, into their own virtual classrooms—equally chaotic, equally doomed. I remember walking past their screens, peering at those sad little Brady Bunch tiles of glitchy faces and frozen smiles and thinking, This isn’t going to work. It didn’t feel like school. It felt like a pathetic simulation of order run by people trying to pilot a burning zeppelin from their kitchen tables.

    I, by contrast, got off scandalously easy. I teach college. My courses were asynchronous, quietly nestled in Canvas like pre-packed emergency rations. No live sessions. No tech panics. Just optional Zoom office hours, which no one attended. I sat in my garage doing kettlebell swings like a suburban monk, then retreated inside to play piano in the filtered afternoon light. The pandemic, for me, was a preview of early retirement: low-contact, low-stakes, and high in self-righteous tranquility.

    My wife envied me. She joked that teaching Zoom classes was like having your teeth drilled by a sadist who lectures you on standardized testing while fumbling with the pliers. And I laughed—too hard, because it wasn’t really a joke.

    The pandemic cracked open a truth I still wince at: the great domestic imbalance. I do chores, yes. I wipe counters, haul laundry, load the dishwasher. But my wife does the emotional heavy lifting—the million invisible tasks of motherhood, schooling, comforting, coordinating. During lockdown, that imbalance stopped being abstract. It stared me in the face.

    For me, quarantine was a hermit’s holiday. For her, it was a battlefield with bad Wi-Fi. And while I’m back to teaching and she’s back to something closer to normal, I haven’t forgotten the ring light, the glazed stare, or the guilt that hums quietly like a broken refrigerator in the back of my mind.

  • The Jungle, the Bigfoot, and the Fan Man Cometh

    The Jungle, the Bigfoot, and the Fan Man Cometh

    Last night I dreamed I was deep in the jungle—not metaphorically, mind you, but the kind you’d find on a Nature Channel special narrated by a vaguely concerned Brit. I wasn’t alone. Beside me stood a woman zookeeper in full khaki safari cosplay, complete with binoculars and a steel gaze. We weren’t observing wildlife—we were at war. The prize? A sprawling jungle compound. The opponent? A hulking, glowering Bigfoot-like brute who looked like he’d crawled out of my Neanderthal ancestry with unresolved issues and a gym membership.

    It was a reality show, naturally. Cameras everywhere. High stakes. Death possible. Maybe probable.

    What shocked me wasn’t the premise—it was me. I watched myself morph from suburban dad into a primal tactician, a creature with cunning in his marrow and bloodlust behind his bifocals. The zookeeper and I didn’t stand a chance physically, but we were shrewd, dirty-fighting strategists. While the beast snorted and stomped like a sentient linebacker, we set a trap—an elegant, jungle-engineered booby trap. And it worked. Bigfoot fell. Cue commercial break. Cue confetti.

    Victory was ours.

    But I, ever the responsible homeowner, sold my half of the prize to the zookeeper in exchange for a wad of cash and a sense of capitalist purpose. I left the jungle compound behind and made my triumphant return not to glory—but to shopping.

    I hit the beachside bazaar with missionary zeal, eyes blazing, nostrils flaring with sea air and consumer ambition. My quarry: fans. Tower fans. Desk fans. Oscillating fans. Fans with remotes, timers, and multi-speed whisper motors. Each vendor pitched their product like they were auditioning for Shark Tank. I nodded sagely as an assistant loaded box after box into a truck like I was provisioning for the end times—but with superior airflow.

    I had ventured into the heart of darkness, found my inner beast, won the battle, and returned not with enlightenment or moral clarity—but with high-performance climate control.

    In the dream’s strange logic, it made perfect sense. I had confronted the savage within, and now, armed with cutting-edge ventilation, I would cool the tempers of suburban life.

    This, apparently, is my idea of spiritual integration.

  • Mother’s Day, Brioche, and the Gospel of Joe

    Mother’s Day, Brioche, and the Gospel of Joe

    Before heading out to Los Alamitos for Mother’s Day, I took out the trash—literal and existential—and ran into my neighbor Joe, who was shirtless, glistening, and fully immersed in the sacred rite of garage cleansing. A former state wrestler, well over six feet and built like a retired Marvel stuntman, he stood there in gym shorts holding his yelping Dachshund like a small, furry accordion.

    “Tell your wife happy Mother’s Day,” he barked, like a man who’s yelled instructions through chain-link fences and Little League dugouts.

    He asked what we were doing. Smash burgers, cake, and ice cream at my sister-in-law’s in Los Alamitos, I told him.

    I floated a question that had been gnawing at me like a rat in the attic: “Should I eat the burger without the brioche bun?”

    Joe turned slowly. Scoffed. “Eat the bun, Jeff. You’re going to die soon.”

    This wasn’t nihilism. This was wisdom from the pulpit of heatstroke and middle-aged clarity.

    “In the last four months, I’ve lost three friends your age,” he said. “One of them was a ripped surfer. Sat down on the couch, died of an aneurysm. Didn’t even spill his smoothie.”

    He paused, letting that land like a kettlebell on my soul.

    “You need twenty-five pounds of emergency fat. A cushion. In case you get sick. You can’t cheat Mother Nature. Eat the bun. Eat the cake. Enjoy your life. Don’t micromanage your macros while white-knuckling your way into an extra ten years of prune juice and self-loathing.”

    It was the most persuasive argument for gluttony I’d ever heard.

    So I went to Los Alamitos. And I didn’t just “cheat”—I defected. I committed dietary treason. I licked frosting off my fingers like it was the Eucharist. I let French vanilla ice cream puddle across my plate without apology.

    The penance would come Monday. That’s the deal.

    But I vowed not to wallow in the usual puddle of self-loathing and Calvinist regret. I would take it like a man. Chin up. Macros reset. Guilt-free. Mostly.

  • The Astroturf Gospel and the Temptation of Lilikoi

    The Astroturf Gospel and the Temptation of Lilikoi

    It’s Mother’s Day, which means my wife and twin daughters are headed to my sister-in-law’s house in Los Alamitos—land of perpetual canopies, well-behaved shrubbery, and a backyard lined with astroturf so immaculate it feels like a corporate fantasy of grass. It’ll be a dry 83 degrees, the kind of weather that screams “perfect” but secretly smells like sunscreen, grilled onions,and the cloying ghost of dryer sheets wafting from the laundry room, where the rhythmic hum of tumbling towels offers the unsettling ASMR of suburban captivity.

    Lunch will be irresistible smash burgers, sizzling beneath a pop-up tent while two imprisoned dogs hurl themselves against the sliding glass door like furry protestors demanding civil rights. Their eyes will say, We are family, so that we mercifully let them free to sniff us and beg for food.

    I’ll eat my 2-pound burger without the brioche buns, which will trigger my brother-in-law Daniel to give me that look. You know the one. The “Oh, you’re dieting again” look, equal parts amusement and subtle mockery. I’ll explain that I began my latest odyssey—The Protein’s Progress—on April 10, and as of yesterday, I’m down 14 pounds. I will present this as fact, not brag. He will respond with his eyes, which will sparkle with skepticism, the kind that says we’ve seen this episode before.

    Once macros are discussed and dismissed, we’ll drift—inevitably—into our usual techno-futurist rabbit hole. Daniel will extol the revolutionary power of 3-D printers, which, according to him, can now build electric cars, houses, power generators, and possibly an emotional support animal, all at half the cost of corporate versions. He’ll pivot to ChatGPT, lamenting its encroachment on college classrooms and human employment in general, before predicting a future where we all live in 3-D-printed orchard communes—rudderless, jobless, and governed by self-appointed mayors fluent in blockchain and Blender.

    I’ll tell him this sounds less like an economic forecast and more like a limited series on HBO Max starring Pedro Pascal and an emotionally damaged android. We’ll laugh.

    Then comes dessert.

    I’ll admire the cakes I brought—one Paradise, one Lilikoi, both from King’s Hawaiian Bakery—and initially, nobly, decline. I will be strong. I will not cave.

    Then my sister-in-law will appear with a Costco-sized tub of Kirkland French Vanilla and start ladling it over thick slices of passionfruit-laced cake, and I will feel something in my chest shift. Not a heart attack—worse. It will be a spiritual failure.

    Excusing myself, I’ll go to the bathroom, stare into the mirror, and whisper, “It’s Mother’s Day. You’re allowed.”

    But the mirror will say, Are you, though?

  • The Bacon Cult vs. the Olive Branch: My Quiet Rebellion Against Carnivore Extremism

    The Bacon Cult vs. the Olive Branch: My Quiet Rebellion Against Carnivore Extremism

    As a veteran of the appetite wars, I’ve heard dispatches from the front lines: fellow travelers claiming victory over hunger by going full carnivore. Their gospel? Two sacred meals a day—meat, eggs, cheese—and a strict excommunication of carbs, 30 grams max. They say this is the only way to stay lean, full, and sane. And for a time, I believe them.

    I could probably ride that high-fat, low-carb wave for three or four months. Then, inevitably, my gag reflex would revolt. There’s only so much sizzling animal fat you can pretend is delicious before your tongue files for emancipation. And while this diet drops weight like a bad habit, I can’t shake the sense that my arteries are whispering, “This is a trap.”

    Then there’s the ethical hangover. Do I really want my health tethered to a parade of livestock? Relying on bacon and beef to feel okay seems like a nutritional pyramid scheme with a side of cognitive dissonance. I’m not a full-blown vegan—spare me the lectures and turmeric lattes—but I don’t want to be dependent on a barnyard either.

    Enter the Mediterranean diet. It won’t melt belly fat like a grease fire, but it doesn’t ask me to choose between wellness and sanity. I’m talking lentils, Greek yogurt, grilled sardines, a smug little splash of olive oil on everything. It’s a diet that feels lived-in, human, sustainable—not some turbo-charged biohack masquerading as a lifestyle.

    Sure, I’ll lose weight slower. But I’ll do it without gagging on bacon or whispering apologies to farm animals in my dreams. Call it wellness with a conscience—or just survival with dignity.

  • Pedagogical Incontinence and Other Nightmares

    Pedagogical Incontinence and Other Nightmares

    Last night, I found myself caught in that classic pedagogical panic dream—the one where you’re supposed to be teaching but haven’t the faintest idea what class you’re in, what subject you’re meant to teach, or whether you’re even wearing pants. In this installment of the recurring nightmare franchise, the setting was not a classroom but a vast beachside arcade—a surreal mash-up of administrative buildings, decrepit apartments, and suspiciously cheerful employees who all seemed to be on the take.

    My only tether to coherence was a middle-aged reentry student named Fred, bald, officious, and inexplicably committed to serving as my personal secretary. Fred wore the expression of a man who once managed a Kinko’s in Bakersfield and had never fully recovered. He trailed me through the maze of kiosks and clammy hallways, reminding me of when my night classes began and which lecture I was supposed to pull out of thin air. He was part calendar app, part parole officer.

    Then Fred vanished. Just like that. I was suddenly alone and bladder-full, desperately seeking a bathroom that refused to stay in one place. The rest of the dream dissolved into a fevered montage of my failed search for a bathroom: dead-ends, hills of ice plant slick with dream-dew, craggy rock climbs worthy of a National Geographic feature on confused professors, and an aquatic plunge into time itself. I dove through the Paleozoic, drifted across the Devonian, waded through the Carboniferous—each era choked with psychedelic fossil-fish and haunting evolutionary whispers. And still, no bathroom. My urgency transcended epochs.

    When I awoke—sweating, humbled, and dry—I was left with one existential question: Was Fred my inner adult, the stoic bureaucrat of my soul? And without him, am I just an overgrown child, lost in a shifting dreamscape, chronically unprepared, and forever in pursuit of a bathroom that may not exist?

  • The Summer of Nosebleeds

    The Summer of Nosebleeds

    In the summer of 1985, I was leaking blood from my nostrils like a second-string horror movie extra. Were the nosebleeds stress-induced? Psychosomatic? The verdict is still out. But my therapist, Dr. Groves, had a theory. He believed I needed to be exorcised—not of demons, but of belief. A staunch atheist moonlighting as a university shrink, Groves had made it his personal crusade to save me from hell—not the place, but my fear of it. My religious conversion, which had hit me like a brick to the chest six years earlier, was the parasite he hoped to dislodge.

    Groves was a rationalist to a fault—smug in the way only a chain-smoking empiricist with a beard full of Twinkie crumbs can be. He listened to my struggles with hellfire theology with a bemused look, as if I were a case study in gullibility. I tried to explain that, like Melville on Hawthorne, I could neither believe nor be at peace in my unbelief. I feared that rejecting the orthodox view of hell might be my express ticket there. Groves was unmoved. His mission? Deconvert me and install a nice, clean OS of secular humanism.

    The problem? I had a too-lively imagination—not whimsical, but operatic. Dreams, half-dreams, hallucinations, visions, and the deeply unsettling conviction that the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz was a demonic entity dispatched from the underworld to haunt me in 480p. Every year when the movie aired, I approached it with the same dread most people reserve for colonoscopies. The lion’s twitchy eyes and unsettling facial prosthetics sent me into existential spirals. As a kid, I didn’t think he looked silly. I thought he was what demons actually looked like.

    When I shared this with Groves, he leaned back in his chair, took a drag of his cigarette, and looked at me through the haze like a zoologist observing a talking panda. He’d nod, scratch his beard, and absentmindedly devour another Twinkie. The man exuded the confidence of someone who believed the universe had been definitively explained in a back issue of Scientific American.

    I told him about my panic attacks in class, my fear of women, and my dreams—recurring nightmares where the Cowardly Lion appeared not as a bumbling mascot, but as a harbinger of damnation. Sometimes I’d wake up drenched in sweat, only to discover the nightmare wasn’t over—he was still in the room. Once, I felt him sitting on the bed beside me. My blood iced over. Breathing became an extreme sport.

    Then came the dream that broke the meter. I’d been mainlining Erich Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and You Shall Be As Gods, trying to cram his brand of secular humanism into the same mental real estate as C.S. Lewis’s tart defenses of Christianity. The dream that followed was a Kafka-meets-Freud set piece: I was sprinting across a field toward a ring of fire, symbolic, I assumed, of Frommian liberation. But before I could reach it, the Cowardly Lion materialized like a bouncer at the gates of meaning. I froze. Couldn’t scream. Couldn’t breathe. Then I “woke up” in bed and began to levitate. Yes, levitate—hovering a foot above the mattress in full cosmic ambiguity.

    When I relayed this to Groves, he suggested a buffet of medications and, more disturbingly, that perhaps I needed a girlfriend. Preferably one with therapeutic talents in bed. That was the beginning of the end for our sessions.

    Meanwhile, I was reading Twilight Zone Magazine like it was scripture. The June 1985 issue featured a story called “Jungle Eyes” and a black panther on the cover. That night, I dreamed I was walking through a Norwegian forest. Tigers approached. Instead of mauling me, they licked my face like affectionate Labradors. I woke up with a bloody nose. But instead of panicking, I let the blood flow freely onto a sheet of paper. A tiger’s face emerged from the drips. I titled it “Tiger’s Blood” and pinned it to my bulletin board.

    Only one person ever saw it: Wade Worthington, keyboardist for a punk band then called Faith No Man. He later helped form Faith No More. Wade was a connoisseur of the bizarre and saw the painting as pure artistic expression. Groves would have seen it as further proof I belonged in a padded room. I kept it to myself.

    Eventually, I dropped Groves and started seeing Dr. Moyers, a Jungian analyst and ex-Seventh-Day Adventist whose office was conveniently close to the wine shop where I worked. Moyers treated my levitation dream, tiger portrait, and nocturnal encounters with the seriousness they deserved. He even invoked Jungian synchronicity. Things were going well until he asked me to play in a sandbox—literally. He had toy soldiers and dinosaurs. I was supposed to commune with my unconscious through sandbox choreography. That’s when I walked.

    By 1987, with a Master’s degree in hand and the desire to appear employable, I decided to repress the entire Summer of Nosebleeds. No more tiger blood. No more levitating. No more Cowardly Lion exorcisms. Rationality was the currency of adult life, and I needed benefits.

    And then, decades later, Dale Allison happened. His book Encountering Mystery cracked open the vault. Reading it at age 61, married with twin teenage daughters and semi-retired in suburban Southern California, felt like receiving a long-overdue permission slip. Here was a scholar admitting that people—sane people—have visions, visitations, encounters with the divine and the infernal. Allison references both William James and David Hufford. Light and shadow. The beatific and the demonic. Finally, someone spoke my language.

    I realized I had never truly processed my four heavenly encounters, which had occurred in a tight, surreal cluster from November 1978 to March 1979. Oddly, they all preceded my Christian conversion—which, it should be noted, was motivated not by love but by fear. Specifically, fear of hell. My conversion, in hindsight, was a theological panic purchase: a desperate grab for Hell Insurance.

    The first encounter came on November 27, 1978—Moscone Night. Dan White had just assassinated Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. Dianne Feinstein announced the news on live TV. I walked outside to our backyard deck and collapsed into a patio chair. That’s when a Giant Me rose from the earth—muscular, aglow, and radiating kindness. He cradled me and whispered, “Be strong. Be good.” It felt real. Too real. But also, too much like a projection. It lacked the unsettling Otherness of what came next.

    A week later, after a Peter Gabriel concert and little sleep, I awoke and saw heaven. Green. Glorious. Humbling. I whispered, “I need to be like this all the time,” and the vision faded like a tide pulling away. That day, I think I had another nosebleed.

    By February 1979, I was working at Taco Bell in Castro Valley. During a break, still wearing the too-small hat meant for smaller craniums, I felt a flood of warmth and heard a message: “Your sole purpose is to love everyone with a pure heart.” A woman at the counter later whispered to her husband, “That young man is very nice.” Little did she know I was a brooding, angry bodybuilder trying to protect a mother unraveling from divorce and bipolar disorder. What she saw was the glow.

    Then, March. Pop Lit class. A joke of a class where the teacher read pulp novels while we filled out book report forms. I was skimming The Weigher of Souls when, out of nowhere, a wave of divine peace overtook me. I said, “I’m at peace,” again and again. I walked out crying, sat in my car, stunned. I think of Pascal’s “Night of Fire.” I called mine Pop Lit.

    Four encounters. Four months. And then—nothing but the cold machinery of doctrine. My Christian conversion in April 1979 was all about HAZMAT theology: God was radioactive, and Jesus was the suit that made divine proximity survivable. Church felt like a cleanup crew at Chernobyl, urging others to put on their gear or face incineration. Penal Substitutionary Atonement, they called it. I called it spiritual trauma.

    It got worse. Church friends assured me my Jewish relatives—including those murdered in Auschwitz—were in hell. God loves you, they said, and now here’s your cup of theological cyanide. I felt gaslit by the well-meaning faithful.

    Not all Christians horrified me. That same summer, in the university library, I stumbled across Rufus Jones’s Fundamental Ends of Life. His vision of faith was neither rescue mission nor social engineering project. It was a love affair. A search for God the way a lover searches for the beloved, a saint for holiness. Jones made me weep. His God resembled the Being I’d met in those four months before the conversion machinery kicked in.

    I wish I could say I became a Quaker like Jones, but I didn’t. I remain in theological limbo. Part of me still clings to the watermelon analogy: if Christian doctrine has seeds, I don’t get to spit them out and still claim the fruit. And yet, I’ve spent sixty-plus years chasing vanity projects and spiritual junk food only to find that the real task—the only task—is what Paul describes in Philippians: becoming like Christ, not in dogma, but in descent. To serve. To empty. To love.

    Frankl says we don’t get to choose meaning; life assigns it. The question is whether we answer the call. And if that means sitting alone in the cheap seats of faith, far from the pulpit, clutching my Tiger’s Blood painting and memories of Pop Lit, then so be it. At least I still believe in the show.

  • The Shop Foreman of My Own Dysfunction and Other Life Chapters

    The Shop Foreman of My Own Dysfunction and Other Life Chapters

    At 63, I now divide my life into chapters—not by achievements or milestones, but by bone density, hormone decay, and the gradual hardening of the frontal cortex. Think of it as an anatomical calendar, where each page curls with protein shakes, pretension, and the occasional existential crisis.

    Chapter One: The Barbara Eden Years.
    Childhood wasn’t about innocence—it was about Cap’n Crunch. Bowls of it. Oceans of sweetened corn rubble. I dreamed not of firetrucks or baseball cards but of living inside Barbara Eden’s genie bottle—a plush, velvet-lined fever dream of satin pillows and cleavage. If Barbara Eden wasn’t beaming into my imagination, there was always Raquel Welch in fur bikinis or Barbara Hershey smoldering her way across a screen. This was hormonal awakening served with a side of sugar coma.

    Chapter Two: The Strength Delusion.
    By twelve, I was slamming Bob Hoffman’s bulk-up protein like it was communion wine. At Earl Warren Junior High, I became a Junior Olympic Weightlifter—a gladiator-in-training who wanted pecs like dinner plates and the gravitas of a Marvel origin story. This was the age of iron worship and adolescent mythology: I wasn’t building muscle—I was forging armor.

    Chapter Three: The Intellectual Flex.
    In my late teens, I realized I had all the social charm of a wet gym sock. So I went cerebral. I buried myself in Kafka, Nabokov, and classical piano, amassing a CD library of Beethoven and Chopin that could rival the Library of Congress. I worked in a wine shop where I learned to pronounce “Bordeaux” with a nasal twang and described Chablis as “crisp with notes of existential regret.” I didn’t just want to be smart—I wanted to be the human embodiment of a New Yorker cartoon.

    Chapter Four: The Shop Foreman of My Own Dysfunction.
    Marriage and employment hit like a cold bucket of reality. Suddenly, I had to function around other human beings. My inner demons—once delightfully antisocial—were now liabilities. I had to manage them like a foreman supervising a warehouse of unruly toddlers armed with crowbars. Turns out, no one wants to be married to a psychological landfill. I had to self-regulate. I had to evolve. This wasn’t personal growth; it was preventative maintenance, or what other people simply call adulthood.

    Chapter Five: Diver Cosplay.
    In my forties, I had just enough disposable income and suburban ennui to start collecting dive watches. Not just one or two. A flotilla. I wanted to be the hero of my own fantasy—a rugged diver-explorer-adventurer who braved Costco parking lots with a Seiko strapped to his wrist. This was less about telling time and more about clinging to the idea that I was still dangerous, or at least interesting. Spoiler: I was neither.

    Chapter Six: The Age of Denial and Delusion.
    These days, the watches still gleam, but now I’m staring down the barrel of cholesterol, visceral fat, and the slow betrayal of my joints. I swing kettlebells five days a week like a garage-dwelling warlock trying to ward off decay. I track my protein like a Wall Street analyst and greet each new biomarker like a hostile corporate audit. Am I aging gracefully? Hardly. I’m white-knuckling my way through geriatric resistance and calling it “wellness.” If I’m Adonis, then somewhere in the attic there’s a Dorian Gray portrait of my pancreas in open revolt.

    I know what’s coming: Chapter Seven. The reckoning. The spiritual compost heap where I either make peace with my body’s betrayal or turn into a bitter relic that grunts through foam-rolling sessions like it’s trench warfare. It’ll be the chapter where I either ascend or unravel—or both.

    And while our chapters differ in flavor, I suspect we’re all reading from the same book. Different fonts, same plot twist: we start with fantasies, build identities, fight the entropy, and eventually, we all kneel before the mirror and ask, “Was that it?”

  • Kafka, Not Clenbuterol

    Kafka, Not Clenbuterol

    I’ve never quite gotten over the deaths of the Mentzer brothers—Mike and Ray—whose obsession with perfection and reliance on steroids ultimately hastened their exit. Their physiques were statuesque, yes, but their lives were carved short. That’s the part that lingers.

    I admire Mike Israetel—he’s brilliant, transparent, and still juiced, albeit at what he calls a “low dose.” He concedes he may shave a decade or more off his life for it. That trade-off sticks with me. It’s a Faustian bargain that never appealed to me, even back in the 70s when the bodybuilding bug bit hard. I was tempted to go all in—steroids, competitions, the works—but I veered. I went to college. I fell for Kafka instead of clenbuterol, and bodybuilding became a passion, not a profession.

    And you know what? That’s been enough.

    I never needed steroids to love the grind. The clang of plates, the satisfying fatigue of a well-earned pump—that’s always been sacred to me. It’s a kind of meditation with weight. No enhancement necessary.

    These days, my goal is simple: keep the protein high and the calories hovering just above the edge of a deficit. Lean enough to see the muscle I’ve built, not buried in fluff. I’m not after mass for mass’s sake—I’ve seen that movie, and the ending isn’t great. I’d rather stay lean and defined than bloated and breathless.

    This isn’t about vanity. I just want to see what’s been built underneath, after fifty years under the bar.

  • Biceps and Biohazards: A Life on Nutritional Alert

    Biceps and Biohazards: A Life on Nutritional Alert

    I’ve been a bodybuilder most of my life. At 63, my muscles still bulge like I’m auditioning for a special forces propaganda reel—but even that doesn’t exempt me from the quiet humiliation of mortality. Lately, I’ve been staring into the abyss not with dread, but with diagnostics. My blood pressure, triglycerides, cholesterol—these numbers have become my new Greek chorus, whispering prophecies of heart disease, kidney failure, and other charming ways the body stages its final betrayal.

    I want to live long. I want to be healthy. I want to be around for my family, not just as a protein-shake-fueled statue, but as someone present, alert, alive. And so I try to eat right. I try to live clean. But in doing so, I’ve become a man who spends his days mentally auditing every almond. I walk through my own kitchen like it’s a minefield, knowing one wrong step—say, a 700-calorie bowl of Shredded Wheat with berries and walnuts—might plunge me into the void.

    This is what vigilance looks like now: standing in front of the fridge at 8 p.m., debating whether two Medjool dates and a dollop of whole milk Greek yogurt is self-care or self-destruction. I’ve got a body that could still turn heads at a funeral, and yet I’m haunted by the nutritional content of a single ounce of bourbon, as if one sip will hurl me into a Roman orgy.

    And so I ask myself: Is this it? Is a healthy life supposed to feel like I’m forever balancing on a dietary razor wire, eyes scanning for invisible enemies made of saturated fat?

    Where’s the joy in this script? Where’s the wonder, the enchantment, the spontaneity that’s supposed to come with vitality? Am I prolonging life or merely stretching the anxiety?

    These are the questions I ask while chewing a forkful of salmon and silently longing for a croissant. Yes, I want to live longer—but must I do it while fearing the yogurt that is staring at me from the refrigerator?