Cinemorphosis

Category: Confessions

  • Snackjection

    Snackjection

    When I was five, my father constructed a treehouse that stood like a beacon of childhood ambition in the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. It was a fortress, a palace, a skyscraper reaching for the heavens—at least in my young mind. In this realm of wood and nails, I sought to assert my dominion, and what better way than with the power of Sun-Maid raisins? One fateful day, I lured Tammy Whitmire to ascend the tree’s wooden slats by brandishing the ultimate weapon: a box of Sun-Maid raisins. This wasn’t just any box; it featured the Sun-Maiden herself, a radiant figure holding a colossal tray of grapes. Her red bonnet and the halo of yellow light marked with white triangles around her head made her look like the Great Raisin Angel, a deity of dried fruit. Tammy, captivated by the angelic glow of the Sun-Maiden, climbed up to join me. Victory seemed imminent until Zane Johnson, lurking in a nearby tree, emerged from a leafy cluster and shattered my triumph. With a smug grin, he declared he had something far superior to my measly raisins: Captain Kangaroo Cookies. These weren’t just cookies; they were double-fudge, cream-centered cookie sandwiches, the culinary equivalent of Excalibur. In the brutal marketplace of childhood affections, my raisins didn’t stand a chance. Tammy, seduced by the allure of Zane’s superior snacks, descended my tree faster than a squirrel on espresso and sprinted to Zane’s treehouse. There, they feasted on the decadent cookies, leaving me alone with my pitiful box of raisins. My reign had ended before it began. Crushed by the betrayal, I reclined in my treehouse and sobbed myself to sleep. But the universe wasn’t done with me yet. I awoke hours later to a stinging horror: my body was swarmed by red fire ants, drawn to the sweet raisins. My skin felt like it had been lashed by a thousand stinging nettles. In agony, I bolted to my apartment where my mother, horrified, gave me a scalding bath to rid me of the ants. In the battle between Sun-Maid Raisins and Captain Kangaroo Cookies, the cookies had won, and I had learned a painful, itchy lesson about the power of snacks and the fickleness of friends.

    This traumatic memory was my introduction to Snackjection–the  soul-bruising humiliation that occurs when your lovingly curated snack—especially one featuring wholesome packaging like a bonneted raisin maiden—is publicly rejected in favor of a rival’s more brand-name, sugar-slicked treat. Often inflicted during the high-stakes snack diplomacy of childhood, Snackjection delivers a one-two punch: the collapse of your social standing and the realization that Captain Kangaroo cookies wield more romantic sway than your dried fruit ever will.

    Symptoms may include:

    • Sudden loss of confidence in your snack brand identity
    • Emotional exile to a solo treehouse
    • Uncontrollable sobbing followed by an insect siege
    • Existential questioning of why the Sun-Maid looks holy but delivers only heartbreak

    Snackjection is the snacktime equivalent of being left at the altar for someone with a lunchbox full of TV tie-in sugar bombs.

  • How 60s TV Gave Us Kibblelust

    How 60s TV Gave Us Kibblelust

    As a kid in the 1960s, I was utterly mesmerized by the tantalizing dog food commercials on TV. Gaines-Burgers, those succulent patties that looked like ground hamburger, and Gravy Train nuggets, which magically transformed into rich, brown gravy with just a splash of water, had my salivary glands working overtime. It was clear that the advertisers had one devious goal: to make dog food so visually appealing that even humans would crave it. And did they succeed.

    I marched up to my dad one day, eyes wide with canine envy, and declared that I wanted to be a dog just so I could savor these advertised delicacies. His face twisted in confusion, then horror, and then a resignation that only a parent can truly master. Determined to cure me of my bizarre wish, he whisked me off to a local bistro and ordered me a French Dip with au jus sauce.

    As the sandwich arrived, dripping with savory goodness, my dad leaned in and asked, “So, how do you like your French Dip?”

    I took a bite, my taste buds doing a happy jig, but instead of expressing my appreciation like a normal human child, I couldn’t resist. I let out a guttural growl, dropped to all fours, and began scratching an imaginary itch with my hind leg, much to the mortification of my father and the bewilderment of the bistro patrons.

    Dad’s face turned a shade of crimson that would have made a ripe tomato jealous. He sighed deeply, clearly questioning his life choices, while I continued my canine performance, convinced that I had discovered the next best thing to Gravy Train. It was then that I realized: the allure of dog food had turned me into a French Dip-devouring, itch-scratching spectacle of childhood absurdity.

     The irrational, often childhood-onset hunger triggered by the hyper-curated presentation of pet food in commercials—particularly dog food stylized to look more appetizing than anything in your pantry. Kibblelust is not mere curiosity; it’s a visceral craving born from the fantasy that somewhere, out there, dogs are eating better than you are.

    Sufferers of Kibblelust may experience symptoms such as food envy toward canines, a desire to bark in public, or in extreme cases, dropping to all fours in a bistro after biting into a French Dip, convinced it’s the closest a human will come to Gravy Train transcendence.

    This condition typically begins with 1960s-70s advertising campaigns involving burger-shaped meat slabs and gravy-generating pellets and is usually cured by a parent’s panicked intervention and a stern lesson in food hierarchy.

    Kibblelust represents the first great betrayal of consumer trust: when you realize advertisers are not above making animal food look better than human cuisine—and you fell for it.

  • The Cake and the Crumbs: A Toddler’s Origin Story of Maximalust

    The Cake and the Crumbs: A Toddler’s Origin Story of Maximalust

    I was a bright-eyed two-year-old growing up in the surreal surroundings of VA housing in Gainesville, Florida. My home, a repurposed army barracks known as Flavet Villages, was nestled near an alligator swamp where the air was thick with the smell of low-tide alligator dung, a stench so potent it could knock out a grown man. Yet, amidst this pungent atmosphere lay an enchanting routine: visiting a Mynah bird perched on the same tree branch in a nearby forest. This mystical bird, almost a local deity, engaged in nightly conversations with my father and me, its wisecracking voice echoing in the twilight. On my second birthday, my father, ever the hero, carried me on his shoulders for our evening visit to the Mynah bird. As we journeyed through the swampy landscape, the scent of celebration wafted from our small apartment, where my mother was busily preparing birthday decorations. In the distance, the melancholic tune of “Bali Ha’i” drifted from a neighbor’s radio, adding a cinematic touch to our adventure. We returned home, greeted by the excitement of neighbors and the promise of birthday cake. The neighbor’s child, a frail wisp of a boy who looked like he might be blown away by the next strong gust of wind, sat in his high chair, a throne of pity contrasting starkly with my robust presence. I, the towering giant of toddlers, was presented with a slice of cake so large it could double as a life raft. The cake, an Everest of chocolate decadence, was all mine to conquer. Then, I glanced at the poor child beside me. His mother, apparently convinced he was a baby bird rather than a human toddler, meticulously pinched off cake crumbs and fed them to him out of the palm of her hand. Each crumb, delivered with the precision of a jeweler setting a diamond, highlighted the stark disparity between my cake feast and his crumb diet. My eyes widened in disbelief. Was this real? Was I witnessing a Dickensian nightmare unfold at my birthday party? My horror magnified as I chewed through my colossal slice of cake, each bite a triumphant celebration of my toddlerhood. Meanwhile, the other child nibbled at his crumbs, a tragic figure resigned to his fate. In my young mind, the situation escalated to epic proportions. I envisioned myself as a benevolent king, feasting on a banquet, while the other boy was a destitute peasant, scrabbling for scraps in my opulent court. That moment, seared into my memory, became a symbol of the great injustices of the world. How could a child, on my birthday no less, be subjected to such cruel cake inequity? The image of his mother, delicately inserting crumbs into his mouth, haunted me like a ghost of birthdays past. It was as if I had witnessed the greatest travesty of my young life, a Shakespearean tragedy played out in frosting and crumbs. Years have passed, and many birthdays have came and went, but the memory remains vivid. I have tasted many cakes since then, each one a reminder of that fateful day when I first encountered true pity. In my exaggerated recollection, the event has grown more fantastical. The crumbs have became smaller, my cake slice grander, and the emotional weight of that moment ever heavier. So here I stand, a veteran of countless birthday celebrations, carrying with me the bittersweet lesson that not all cake experiences are created equal. And perhaps, in my heart of hearts, I’ve learned to savor every slice of cake with the gratitude of one who knows that somewhere, someone might be living on crumbs.

    The deeply embedded, early-life memory resulted in the belief that more food is always better—more validating, more righteous, more deserved. Born in toddlerhood and fed by birthday cakes the size of rafts, Maximalust is not just a craving—it’s a worldview. It equates abundance with virtue and scarcity with shame. It’s the toddler id that sees a normal portion and thinks, “Who hurt you?” It’s the pathology that makes buffets feel like moral high ground and crumbs like moral failure. Maximalust is the primal belief that to be loved is to be laden with frosting.

    In addition to Maximalust, I discovered the notion of Crumbpassion–the emotional dissonance that arises when your plate is Mount Olympus and theirs is a cautionary tale. It is not kindness—it’s existential discomfort wrapped in frosting empathy. The crumb-fed child becomes a Dickensian ghost, a living allegory of restraint, and you, the overfed protagonist, must reckon with the unfairness of cake distribution and your own frosting-fueled privilege.

    Together, Maximalust and Crumbpassion form a tragicomic framework of early appetite mythology—a toddler’s origin story of food, power, and pity that lives rent-free in your adult relationship with dessert.

  • My Personal Sane Eating Lexicon: Cravattenuation, Savorosity, and Munchdrift

    My Personal Sane Eating Lexicon: Cravattenuation, Savorosity, and Munchdrift

    On April 10th, fresh off a family vacation in Miami and still spiritually sticky with airport pastrami sandwich guilt, I stepped on the scale and was greeted with a soul-curdling 247 pounds. Yes, some of it is lifelong muscle from half a century of hoisting kettlebells and playing Hercules in the garage. But make no mistake—this number was a slap in the face, a statistical insult to my dignity. Fueled by a righteous anger I can only describe as metabolic revenge, I went to war.

    First, I cut my meals down to three per day and gamified the system like a psychological Jedi. My lunchtime yogurt-and-berries bowl got reassigned as a post-nap “treat,” and a humble apple—normally the most boring fruit in the bowl—was elevated to nightly “dessert,” strategically scheduled for 8 p.m. to give my inner child something to cling to as the kitchen closed. I also slashed my coffee intake from 36 to 18 ounces (don’t worry, I’m still barely human), and dropped my creatine from 6 grams to a mere 3—enough to retain my swole, but not enough to float like a sodium balloon.

    Meanwhile, I came to grips with the ugly truth that I was overstuffing both my freezer and my face. The freezer had become a metaphor for my appetite: jammed with frozen berries, low-carb snacks, and delusions of future discipline. Constantly raiding it created two problems: overconsumption and literal water puddles from a clogged defrost drain. My wife and I emptied the thing out like detoxing hoarders, and miraculously, the fridge stopped weeping. I then purchased a chest freezer for the garage to create a buffer zone—a cold storage moat to protect the kitchen from my impulsive nibbling.

    By April 19, I had dropped to 240 pounds—a loss of seven pounds in nine days, even with an Easter cheat day that involved chocolate cake and blueberry pie, which I regret nothing about. Today I weigh again after my workout, prepared to assess the pastry fallout. But here’s the real revelation from those ten days: the hunger I thought I was feeling wasn’t hunger—it was performance anxiety from my stomach, a neurotic need to react to every twitch of emptiness like it was a national emergency. That, my friends, is where Cravattenuation comes in.

    Cravattenuation is the noble and necessary art of muting your inner snack gremlin—the one who panics at the first polite growl of your stomach and demands cheese. It’s the mental and metabolic recalibration that teaches you this: real hunger is not a 3 p.m. yawn with a craving for almonds. It’s a deeper emptiness, one you can actually enjoy. Because when you let your appetite stretch out and breathe, you arrive at meals not with guilt or compulsion, but with appetite and joy. Hunger becomes less of a trigger and more of a drumroll.

    Cravattenuation the deliberate process of retraining your body to interpret minor hunger signals not as existential emergencies but as low-priority system notifications: “You might want to eat in a bit” instead of “RAID THE PANTRY OR DIE.” Just as meditation teaches you to sit with discomfort rather than react impulsively, Cravattenuation teaches you that a little hunger isn’t a crisis—it’s foreplay for a better meal.

    We’ve been conditioned by snack culture and anxiety-driven consumption to treat hunger as something to be feared and fixed immediately, like a smoke alarm or a toddler tantrum. But when you practice Cravattenuation, something remarkable happens: your threshold for hunger strengthens, and the urgency softens. You learn to sit with a mild stomach pang without spiraling into carb-lust. Over time, you develop what can only be described as Hunger Discernment: the ability to separate emotional nibble-itching from true physiological need.

    The Unexpected Perk:

    By making your body earn the meal—not through punishment, but patience—you begin to eat with a clarity and joy that’s been missing since the dawn of office vending machines. Food tastes better when you’re actually hungry for it. Not “kinda bored” hungry, not “scrolling through cheese reels” hungry, but real hungry. Cravattenuation helps you not only manage your weight with more ease and grace, it re-enchants the eating experience itself. You’ll start treating meals like mini homecomings rather than pit stops at a dopamine gas station.

    Name for the Healthy State: Savorosity

    (savor + satiety + curiosity)

    Savorosity is the elegant state you enter after mastering Cravattenuation—a zone where hunger feels less like a hostage crisis and more like an invitation. It’s when you greet mealtime with curiosity and pleasure, not guilt or compulsion. It’s when you chew slower, taste deeper, and know you’ve arrived not because you gave in to a craving, but because you earned your appetite.

    Cravattenuation gets you there. Savorosity keeps you there. And together, they free you from the tyranny of the pantry’s siren call.

    Of course, the desired state of Savorosity has an opposite condition: Munchdrift, which is the mindless, momentum-driven eating that results from random grazing, emotional nibbling, and culinary boredom. It’s what happens when hunger is no longer a signal but a background noise, muffled by routine snacking and phantom cravings. In the Munchdrift state, meals are neither anticipated nor savored—they’re accidental. A handful of nuts here, a swipe of hummus there, three spoonfuls of cottage cheese at midnight, and suddenly, you’ve eaten 1,200 calories without ever feeling either full or satisfied. The food doesn’t taste bad; it just doesn’t taste like anything—because your palate is bored and your appetite never had a chance to sharpen.

    While Savorosity is marked by intentionality, restraint, and presence, Munchdrift is all drift and no anchor. It’s eating as ambient noise. It’s the cognitive equivalent of scrolling Instagram while watching TV while wondering why you’re still chewing. 

  • The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    The Resurrection and Other Interruptions to My Nap

    This Saturday afternoon, somewhere between my post-kettlebell stupor and the first REM cycle, I drifted into the odd liminal space where podcasts mingle with dreams. In my AirPods: Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast, where the ever-Catholic provocateur was in conversation with Francis Collins, the brilliant scientist and evangelical convert who led the Human Genome Project and somehow still believes Jesus flew to Heaven in a flesh-and-spirit upgrade that sounds suspiciously like the beta version of a Marvel character.

    These two men—earnest, erudite, and disturbingly unbothered by the metaphysical gymnastics required—agreed that Jesus was no zombie. No, the risen Christ, they insisted, was something far more sophisticated: a being of glorified materiality, capable of munching on grilled fish one moment and defying the laws of gravity the next. As I lay there, blinking ceiling-ward in the warm afterglow of lactic acid and religious speculation, it hit me: I’m a doubter. Not an edgy nihilist, just your garden-variety agnostic with a decades-long lease agreement in my head, where Jesus and Paul have been living rent-free since I hit puberty.

    The part I can’t swallow—resurrection aside—is substitutionary atonement. The notion that a God supposedly defined by love could only be appeased by orchestrating a cosmic bloodletting reads less like theology and more like something out of a Bronze Age mafia drama. And yet, Sullivan and Collins weren’t foaming zealots—they were thoughtful, gracious, luminously intelligent men. Which led me, mid-nap, to remember Emmanuel Carrère’s The Kingdom, a fever dream of a novel in which the narrator interrogates Luke, the Gospel’s narrator, with a mix of admiration, suspicion, and barely-contained despair. It’s the story of someone trying to understand the story being told by someone who wasn’t sure they believed it either.

    Somewhere between guilt, caffeine, and the ache in my glutes, I sat up and thought: Maybe I should write a novel. Not about Jesus—he already has a publisher—but about me wrestling with Carrère, while Carrère wrestles with Luke, while Sullivan and Collins serenely eat fish with the risen Lord. It’s wildly ambitious, probably self-indulgent, and smells faintly of midlife crisis. But what’s faith—or doubt—if not the ultimate literary prompt?

  • Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    Harry Potter and the Chamber of Dental Horrors

    My journey with claustrophobia is not a quirk. It is a full-blown, sweat-drenched neurological prison riot. And nowhere does this disorder stage a more operatic coup than in two places: the dentist’s chair and the bowels of Universal Studios, Studio City.

    Let’s start with the latter—a cautionary tale that should be printed on the back of every park map. I should never have stepped foot in that glorified mall of overpriced grease traps and postmodern carnival barkers wearing epaulets, who reeked of mothballs and dashed dreams. But I did it—for my twin daughters. For my wife. For the illusion that fatherhood sometimes requires nobility.

    The fatal mistake? Boarding the Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey ride, a title that now feels like prophecy. After a Kafkaesque hour in line, I was shoehorned into a toddler-sized aircraft seat, and then came the final insult: a steel bar clamped down on my chest like it was sealing me into a medieval torture rack. My 52-inch ribcage was not consulted. My lungs issued an immediate protest.

    As the ride lurched forward into a black tunnel engineered by Satan himself, I realized I was not going to survive. I began pleading, then shrieking for them to stop the ride—a desperate man reduced to primal terror. Mercifully, the passengers next to me joined in my hysteria, and their collective outcry finally penetrated the headset of some underpaid engineer who ground the machine to a halt. A stoic security guy with a Secret Service haircut approached as I peeled myself out of the deathtrap.

    “You want to debrief me in the trauma tent?” I muttered, trying to laugh through the ash cloud of my dignity.

    Fast-forward to a few weeks later: I’m back in another chamber of horrors—Dr. Howard Chen’s dental office. A kind, soft-spoken man, Dr. Chen has the patience of a monk and the eyes of someone who’s seen too much. During a routine procedure, he inserted a rubber bite block into my mouth—also known as the Mouth Prop from Hell. It jammed my jaw open, restricted my ability to swallow, and in seconds, transported me back to that Potter ride with its clamping harness and tunnel of doom.

    I shot up from the chair, peeled off my flannel shirt like it was doused in napalm, and stood hyperventilating while sweat poured down my face like I’d just run the Boston Marathon with a fever.

    Dr. Chen asked gently, “Are you going to be okay, Jeff?”

    “I can’t have this rubber thing in my mouth,” I gasped, holding it like it was radioactive.

    He removed it. Deep breaths. Back in the chair. We finished the procedure bite-block free, no further incidents—except for my lingering shame.

    My visits to Dr. Chen are a multisensory assault. I am what polite society would call a “super smeller.” What that means in a dental context is that I’m stewing in a noxious stew of clove oil, latex gloves, glutaraldehyde, and ghostly wafts of tooth dust from patients past. Throw in the sound of Neil Diamond warbling over the speakers and it becomes less a cleaning and more a ritualistic descent into madness.

    Every visit turns existential. I begin contemplating my soul, my legacy, and the probability that I’ll die while getting a fluoride rinse. It’s the only time I think about the afterlife more than I do during a colonoscopy—and that includes the part when they say, “You may feel a little pressure.”

    To his credit, Dr. Chen is a saint. He accommodates all my neuroses, never rushes me, and tries to soothe me with words that sound like Buddhist proverbs run through a dental insurance filter. “Let the Sonicare do the work,” he tells me. “But I don’t trust it,” I reply. “Then you must learn to trust.” “But I am a man of doubt.” “That, Jeff,” he says, “is obvious.”

    At my most recent appointment, he warned me of potential decay under an old filling. “We may need to do a root canal.” I responded like a man learning he’d tested positive for eternal damnation.

    “What can I do to stop this?”

    “Cut the sugar. Don’t brush like you’re sanding drywall.”

    “So what you’re saying is, I’m threading the needle here.”

    “Basically, yes.”

    “Doctor, I crave absolutes.”

    “Join the club.”

    Dr. Chen’s resignation to life’s uncertainty is what keeps me coming back. That, and the knowledge that no other dentist could possibly endure the psychological obstacle course that is my biannual cleaning.

    After my last visit, dazed from polishing paste and light dental trauma, I left the office only to nearly reverse my car into a black SUV. The horn blast nearly cracked my molars. As I sat there recovering, I looked up and saw Dr. Chen watching me from behind the blinds—no longer smiling, but staring with the flat, weary eyes of a man who had just confirmed what he’d long suspected: his patient was, in fact, completely insane.

    And he was right.

  • Cartoon Eve and the Algorithmic Hangover

    Cartoon Eve and the Algorithmic Hangover

    In the early ’70s, the network execs at ABC, CBS, and NBC pulled a marketing move so manipulative it should’ve been illegal under the Geneva Conventions. On a hallowed Friday night in the month of September, they handed kids a psychic dog biscuit: a glittering preview of Saturday morning’s new cartoon lineup. As a nine-year-old, I’d sit cross-legged in front of the TV, slack-jawed and vibrating, watching grainy flashes of The Bugaloos and H.R. Pufnstuf like I was being shown a trailer for heaven. It was less of a preview and more of a grilled Ribeye waved under my nose by a smiling sadist who tells me breakfast is in 12 hours.

    Sleep was not an option on Cartoon Eve, a night more sacred than Christmas, Easter, and your grandma’s funeral combined. I’d lie in bed thinking, What if I sleep in? What if I miss the premiere of Lidsville? What if, in a moment of tragic miscalculation, I eat my Cap’n Crunch in the kitchen instead of the TV room and lose valuable viewing seconds? These were the pre-digital days—no DVR, no YouTube, no forgiveness. If you missed it, you missed it. You could cry, but the cathode ray tube did not care.

    The masterminds behind these shows weren’t just marketers—they were psychological arsonists, setting fire to our dopamine circuits before we were old enough to spell serotonin. They didn’t just sell cartoons. They sold Tang, Danish Go-Rounds, and Pillsbury Space Sticks with the breathless urgency of black-market opioids. The shows started at 7 a.m. and ran till 11, but by 10 I’d start to feel queasy. I’d hear the crack of a baseball bat outside and realize I was sitting in a dim living room while my real childhood was playing third base across the street. That’s when the guilt set in—the primal, shame-soaked knowledge that I was trading sunshine and scraped knees for anthropomorphic cereal mascots and animated product placement.

    Eventually I’d fling off my pajamas like a molting larva, throw on jeans, and bolt out the door, desperate to reclaim the morning before it calcified into regret. Childhood, I realized, was a loop of anticipation, overstimulation, and the fear of having made the wrong choice.

    But compared to today’s chaos, that quaint Saturday-morning psychodrama feels like a gentle massage from Mr. Rogers. Social media is Cartoon Eve with weapons-grade dopamine—a psychic arms race where even adults devolve into sweaty, wide-eyed nine-year-olds, tapping their screens like they’re trying to summon a cartoon genie.

    After a decade of scrolling, I’ve pulled the plug. I’ve cut back my digital exposure by 97%, and what’s left is like being a shell-shocked tourist floating down the Amazon on a deflating raft, watching piranhas in mid-frenzy shred a water buffalo. It’s gruesomely riveting, but it fries your soul and robs you of original thought. Now, like millions of others, I am in post-social media convalescence—pale, twitchy, and unsure if I’ll ever feel real sunlight again.

    But one thing’s for certain: I don’t miss the Space Sticks.

  • The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    The Undying Curiosity of a Reluctant Earthling

    About ten years ago, I found myself standing on the sun-scorched lawn outside the campus library, chatting with a colleague who was edging into his sixties. I was freshly minted into my early fifties, just far enough along to start scanning the horizon for signs of irrelevance. Naturally, our conversation slid into that black hole topic older academics can’t resist: retirement—or, as my colleague eloquently rebranded it, “a form of extinction.” According to him, the day you stop teaching is the day your name starts sliding off the whiteboard of history. You don’t just stop working—you vanish. The world changes its locks, and your keycard stops scanning.

    From there, the conversation took its next logical step—death. And that’s when I said something that was equal parts earnest and glib:
    “Even at my lowest, most gut-punched moments, I’ve always had this strange, burning desire not only to live—but to never die.”
    Why? Because I am possessed by a compulsive need to know how it all turns out.

    On the grand scale:
    Was Martin Luther King Jr. right? Does the moral arc of the universe really bend toward justice—or is it more like a warped coat hanger, twisted in a fit of cosmic indifference?
    Will humanity eventually outgrow its primal stupidity and evolve into a species guided by reason?
    Or will we just become meat-bots—part flesh, part firmware—hunched under the cold glow of the Tech Lords who now sell us grief as a service?
    Will thinking, one day, come in capsule form—a sort of Philosophy 101 chewable tablet for those who can’t be bothered?

    But my curiosity isn’t all grandiloquent and philosophical. I want to know the dumb stuff, too.
    Who’s going to win the Super Bowl?
    What will dethrone the current Netflix darling?
    Who will succeed Salma Hayek as the reigning goddess of unattainable beauty?

    Like every other poor soul conscripted onto Planet Earth, I didn’t ask to be born. But now that I’m here, uninvited and overcommitted, I can’t help it—I want to see how this mess plays out.

    Still, I sometimes wonder: Am I just a naive late bloomer clinging to a plot twist that isn’t coming?
    Is there some ancient nihilist out there—smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and muttering aphorisms in a grim little café—who would look at me and sneer, “What’s the fuss, kid? It’s all the same. Same story, different soundtrack.”

    Maybe.
    But I think there’s a stubborn ember in me that keeps expecting irony to trump monotony, that believes the cynic’s spreadsheet of life’s futility has a few formula errors. Maybe my refusal to give up on surprise is what keeps my inner candle burning.

    And maybe, just maybe, that makes me an optimist in exile—still walking the fence between wonder and weary resignation, while the true cynics stand on the other side, arms crossed, whispering,
    “Don’t worry, you’ll be like us soon enough.”

  • Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    Field-Testing FOMO: A Preteen Cautionary Tale

    One warm California afternoon in the spring of 1973, after sixth-grade classes had spit us out like a bad punchline and the school bus rumbled off down Crow Canyon Road, my friends and I embarked on our sacred post-school ritual: a pilgrimage to 7-Eleven to score a Slurpee before the long, punishing hike up Greenridge Road. Inside that fluorescent-lit temple of artificial flavors, “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl)” crackled from the tinny store radio, bouncing off racks of bubble gum, jerky, and preteen dreams.

    That’s when the Horsefault sisters burst through the door like a blonde tornado.

    They were tall, freckled, sunburned Valkyries from the far reaches of suburban myth—bohemian chaos in halter tops. One was an eighth grader; the other, a high school sophomore with the kind of don’t-care confidence that could collapse a twelve-year-old boy’s worldview with a single sideways glance. They lived in a crumbling farmhouse behind the store, surrounded by the ghosts of chickens and a rumored pony.

    “Wanna see a rabbit in a cage?” the younger one asked, her grin full of bad intentions and orthodontic defiance.

    I didn’t care about rabbits. I cared about girls who looked like they had stepped out of a beer commercial set in a wheat field. And so I followed, fully aware I was marching into a trap and fully unable to care.

    The promised rabbit, of course, was a fiction. There was only a rusted cage yawning open like a rural Venus flytrap and the pungent perfume of hay, alfalfa, and whatever was left of last week’s poultry. The ambush was swift. The sisters descended with whoops and laughter, a feral tag team of dusty mischief trying to stuff me into the iron cage like I was tomorrow’s 4-H exhibit.

    I fought back. I was stocky, wired with sixth-grade testosterone and Charles Atlas dreams. We tumbled in the grass in a chaotic montage of limbs, dust, and feathers—a scene less like a flirtation and more like a deleted sequence from Deliverance if Deliverance had a laugh track.

    Eventually they gave up, giggling, breathless, their cheeks streaked with dirt and conquest. I bolted through the field, leaving behind my Slurpee and what might’ve been the preamble to an adolescence worth bragging about.

    But here’s the thing: they never kissed me.
    They never flirted. Never winked or smirked in that conspiratorial way older girls sometimes do when they’re letting you in on a secret you can’t yet handle. They tried to lock me in a cage and laughed when they couldn’t. That was it.

    And that—not the dirt, not the missing rabbit, not the poultry apocalypse—is what still lingers decades later: the almost. The sense that something wild and electric passed me by, and I walked away not transformed but merely dirty.

    That was my first real encounter with FOMO—before the word existed, before social media turned it into a lifestyle disorder. The regret wasn’t that I was almost caged. It was that I didn’t emerge with a story soaked in danger and romance. I didn’t get the wink. I didn’t get the kiss. I didn’t get them.

    I went home and turned on the TV to find Barbara Eden cooing in her harem pants, still radiant, still unattainable, still safely contained in her bottle. And I realized that day: I didn’t want to summon Jeannie. I wanted to be summoned—chosen, winked at, whispered to. But the Horsefault sisters were not granting wishes. They were disrupting ecosystems and giving boys premature nostalgia.

    And I, poor idiot, had missed my moment.

  • Foam Alone: The Hipster Bed Hustle and the Cult of Compressed Cool

    Foam Alone: The Hipster Bed Hustle and the Cult of Compressed Cool

    Recently, my wife and I embarked on that most sacred and ridiculous rite of modern consumer adulthood: mattress shopping. But not just any mattress. No, we were lured—like moths to an ironic Edison bulb—by the siren song of the “bed in a box” movement. You know the pitch: memory foam meets gel, vacuum-sealed into a tight roll like a Chipotle burrito of luxury. Just slice it open with a box cutter and voilà!—it unfurls into a California King, like some latex-based resurrection miracle, all while promising to align your spine and your chakras.

    The in-store experience was a curated fever dream. We lay on foam slabs priced between three and nine thousand dollars, enveloped in mood lighting, whisper-soft sales pitches, and ambient indie folk. The mattresses were… fine. They cradled our backs, cupped our hip joints, whispered sweet nothings to our lumbar region. But I wasn’t feeling transcendent—I was feeling sold. Somewhere, I imagined a marketing team high-fiving over a whiteboard with phrases like “Artisanal Sleep” and “Millennial Mattress Disruption” scribbled in dry-erase bravado.

    It wasn’t just a mattress we were meant to be buying—it was an identity. A lifestyle. Minimalist, eco-cool, unburdened by the dusty sins of box springs and showroom floor futons. The subtext was loud: if you’re still buying a traditional mattress, you might as well admit you still use a rotary phone and tuck in your t-shirts. FOMO was baked into every layer of that overpriced memory foam: Buy this, or accept your fate as an aging square who sleeps like a Boomer.

    Once home, I turned to the digital sages—AI platforms, review aggregators, comment sections brimming with keyboard philosophers. The consensus was sobering: “Bed in a box? Cute gimmick. Overhyped. Questionable lifespan.” It turns out luxury doesn’t arrive folded like a quesadilla and held together by hope and branding. Traditional mattresses—those innerspring tanks and hybrid fortresses—still dominate in sheer performance. They don’t need to be unpacked with surgical caution, and they’ll cradle your creaky skeleton well into the next presidential administration.

    The most damning flaw? Durability. You can drop four grand on a foam mattress with a name that sounds like a startup and a logo that belongs on a vape pen, and five years later you’ll be sleeping in a crater. Meanwhile, that crusty old-school mattress from the showroom? Still holding you up like a reliable ex who pays their taxes and owns real furniture.

    In the end, we walked away—me, a little wiser, a little smugger, fully unfooled. I had dodged the algorithmic shame cycle of “Buy now or die alone in orthopedic misery.” I collapsed onto my overpriced sectional—a remnant of a different consumer panic—and streamed stand-up comedy with the gentle satisfaction of a man who knew that comfort, real comfort, doesn’t need branding. It just needs springs that don’t flatten and marketing that doesn’t gaslight you into thinking your dignity lies inside a vacuum-sealed tube of artisanal foam.