Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Why Online Education Deserves Defending

    Since the COVID lockdown, most of my teaching has migrated online. Even now, roughly three-fourths of my courses remain in the digital realm, where students encounter me less as a flesh-and-blood professor pacing beneath fluorescent lights and more as a disembodied presence living inside Canvas announcements, discussion boards, and video lectures recorded in my home office.

    To my surprise, retention rates remain strong. That fact alone suggests online learning serves a real need for many students whose lives resemble logistical hostage situations involving jobs, childcare, commutes, aging parents, unstable work schedules, and economic exhaustion. For these students, online education is not a luxury. It is the only doorway left open.

    Still, online learning clearly is not for everyone.

    Today’s Los Angeles Times article, “‘I felt like I wasn’t learning’: Community college students struggle with online education” by Adam Echelman, highlights several genuine problems now reshaping higher education.

    First, nearly 40 percent of community college classes are online, leaving many campuses eerily underpopulated. I see this myself every time I walk across campus beneath giant stretches of empty concrete where student traffic once resembled an airport terminal. Some days the college feels less like a thriving institution of learning and more like the abandoned set of a post-apocalyptic indie film where only the squirrels still believe enrollment is healthy.

    Second, online education is highly vulnerable to AI-assisted academic dishonesty. Entire assignments can now be outsourced to machines with frightening ease. Students who once copied homework from friends can now summon instant essays, summaries, reflections, and discussion-board responses generated in seconds by software that never sleeps and never complains about deadlines. Academic rigor has unquestionably been destabilized.

    Third, many students experience profound disorientation in online courses. They sit alone at glowing screens trying to decode unfamiliar interfaces, navigate modules, interpret assignment instructions, and manage deadlines without the immediate human structure of a physical classroom. Some students thrive in this environment. Others feel psychologically untethered, as though they have been dropped into an educational escape room with no map and unreliable Wi-Fi.

    All of these criticisms contain truth.

    But I still feel compelled to defend online education because face-to-face instruction creates its own formidable barriers that critics often romanticize away.

    Many students simply do not possess the time, transportation, money, childcare, emotional bandwidth, or scheduling flexibility necessary to attend traditional classes several times a week. Others suffer from social anxiety so severe that walking into a crowded classroom feels less like entering a learning environment and more like arriving for public execution. Some students experience the same confusion staring at a printed syllabus that others experience navigating Canvas. Confusion is not unique to online learning; it is part of learning itself.

    And AI has disrupted all education, not merely online education.

    The fantasy that we can restore some pristine pre-pandemic classroom paradise by dragging everyone back into physical seats ignores reality entirely. Face-to-face classes are also saturated with AI. Students use it in dorm rooms, libraries, cafeterias, parking lots, and sometimes while sitting directly in front of us pretending to take notes. The disruption is universal.

    We are living through a historical transition in which educators are desperately trying to preserve critical thinking, reading, writing, and job preparation while technological conditions mutate faster than institutional bureaucracy can respond. No one possesses perfect answers. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling nostalgia disguised as certainty.

    But I remain optimistic.

    Online teaching continues improving. Faculty are becoming more sophisticated in course design, communication, engagement strategies, video instruction, accessibility, and platform navigation. We are learning how to create clearer modules, more interactive coursework, better communication systems, and stronger student support structures. In many cases, students now receive the best aspects of both worlds: the flexibility of online access combined with increasingly refined teaching methods.

    And flexibility matters enormously.

    For many community college students, education is squeezed into the margins of adult survival. They complete assignments after ten-hour shifts, during lunch breaks, inside parked cars, while supervising children, or late at night after the household finally quiets down. Critics who romanticize the traditional campus experience often imagine eighteen-year-olds strolling across ivy-covered quads discussing philosophy beneath oak trees. Community college reality is far less cinematic. It involves exhaustion, economic pressure, and scheduling warfare.

    All of higher education is undergoing massive disruption simultaneously:

    • AI is transforming intellectual labor.
    • Student attention spans are changing.
    • Economic pressures are intensifying.
    • Online teaching technologies are improving.
    • Work and family demands are growing more brutal.

    Under these conditions, demanding a wholesale return to “the old ways” feels less like wisdom and more like denial.

    The old world is not coming back.

    That does not mean standards should collapse or that online learning is automatically superior. It means education must evolve alongside the lives students actually live rather than the lives institutions nostalgically wish they still lived.

    Online education will continue improving because necessity drives innovation with ruthless efficiency. Likewise, our understanding of how to create meaningful, rigorous, and humane education in the AI Age will continue evolving. We are not witnessing the death of learning. We are witnessing the painful reconstruction of it.

    The task now is not retreat. It is adaptation.

    It is time to move forward rather than cling romantically to a vanished academic world that technology, economics, and history have already left behind.

  • Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    Waiting for Moments That Never Come

    I shouldn’t indulge in self-pity or perform the aging writer’s ritual of staring mournfully into the middle distance while pretending the universe failed to recognize his genius. I have much to be grateful for. Still, as retirement approaches, I feel obligated to conduct a private audit of my creative life, and the results are complicated.

    At this stage, I imagined I would feel artistically established, as though decades of writing would eventually crystallize into some stable literary identity. Instead, every morning I wake up and begin again from scratch like a man rebuilding a sandcastle the tide erased overnight. I sit before the keyboard hoping language will once again perform its small daily miracle.

    To my credit, I recently completed a collection of eleven stories. That matters. The stories revolve around men whose obsessions slowly consume them: bodybuilders, hedonists, nihilists, dandies, counterfeit aristocrats, and assorted spiritual casualties wandering through the desert of modern American masculinity. I titled the collection What Does It Profit a Man to Gain the World and Lose His Soul?—which sounds either appropriately biblical or like the warning label on an energy drink marketed to divorced men in sports cars.

    The stories took years to finish because they were rewritten endlessly. Rewrites of rewrites of rewrites of rewrites. Entire paragraphs were dismantled and reconstructed so many times they resembled neighborhoods destroyed by artillery fire and rebuilt brick by brick. Yet I am grateful for the struggle because the stories finally feel as though they exist in the form they were always trying to reach. The characters and scenarios have haunted me for decades, lingering in my imagination like unresolved ghosts demanding literary exorcism. Finishing the book feels less like triumph than relief.

    I harbor no fantasy that these stories will suddenly launch me into literary celebrity. To keep myself psychologically grounded, I think about Rick Bass and his story collection The Watch from the 1990s. Those stories struck me as wild, profound, and emotionally unhinged in the best possible way—worthy of Gogol or Chekhov—yet Bass never ascended into the literary superstardom our culture reserves for a tiny handful of writers. He flourished artistically while remaining, to the broader public, relatively obscure.

    But obscurity is crowded with greatness.

    I think too of one of my favorite bands, The Trash Can Sinatras. I still remember standing inside a grimy T-shirt store on Hollywood Boulevard flipping through posters of The Smiths and Morrissey when “Obscurity Knocks” came over the speakers. The song hit me with such strange emotional precision that I immediately bought their album Cake and became a devotee for life.

    And yet did The Trash Can Sinatras become massively famous? Hardly.

    They nearly disappeared altogether before a small but stubborn online following revived them in the early 2000s. They continue making music today with almost monastic devotion despite occupying only a microscopic corner of the attention economy. As I write this, their official YouTube channel has roughly 3,500 subscribers—a number that feels morally absurd when one considers the beauty and intelligence of their music. In the metrics of the modern algorithmic carnival, they reside near the basement. In my mind, they stand near the summit.

    But perhaps my indignation itself reveals the problem.

    I keep imposing upon artists an American mythology that has been drilled into my brain since childhood: the myth of the self-made man. In this story, success arrives as visible conquest. The hero works relentlessly, overcomes humiliation and doubt, climbs the mountain, and finally receives public veneration, wealth, applause, and symbolic immortality. The crowd cheers. The parade begins. The nectar is consumed.

    Except reality rarely behaves this way.

    Many artists labor for decades, sharpen their craft, discover their authentic voice, and produce extraordinary work only to become beloved by small circles of devoted admirers rather than the masses. They are not failures. The dice simply landed where they landed. They flourished artistically without the bestseller list, Netflix adaptation, sold-out stadium, or blue-check coronation from the gods of cultural relevance.

    Even Dante Alighieri died in relative hardship. History later built the cathedral.

    As an American raised on success mythology—from Horatio Alger fantasies to that smug little children’s story about the train repeating “I think I can”—I find it difficult to fully abandon the fantasy that hard work eventually produces not merely accomplishment but wholeness. Somewhere deep inside me remains the childish belief that if I simply grind long enough, write hard enough, revise carefully enough, and suffer nobly enough, some grand validation ceremony awaits at the end.

    But one of the greatest scenes in The Wire dismantles that illusion with brutal clarity. Detective Lester Freamon warns Jimmy McNulty that police work will not save him. There is no grand parade waiting. No expensive watch. No final moment where the universe declares the suffering worthwhile. Lester tells him plainly: “This job will not save you, Jimmy. It won’t make you whole.”

    That line haunts me because it applies to almost everything Americans worship.

    Career.
    Status.
    Achievement.
    Recognition.
    Fame.
    Productivity.

    We imagine these things will rescue us from our unfinished selves. But Lester understands the deeper truth: life is happening elsewhere while we wait for the grand moment of validation that never fully arrives. As he says, life is “the shit that happens while you’re waiting for moments that never come.”

    What does it mean, then, to “get a life”?

    Perhaps it means accepting that there is no final coronation waiting beyond the horizon. No guaranteed fanfare. No cosmic scoreboard fairly distributing glory according to merit. Perhaps maturity means seeing clearly that art is not a vending machine where years of labor reliably produce fame and transcendence. Sometimes the reward is simply the work itself, the strange companionship of characters who haunted you into existence, and the small circle of people who genuinely understand what you made.

    Perhaps that has to be enough.

  • Learning to Speak Rich

    Learning to Speak Rich

    Known publicly as bell hooks in honor of her grandmother, hooks explores in her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” a deeply conflicted relationship with education, class mobility, race, and selfhood. Her story is not a simple celebration of academic success. It is the story of a woman who discovers that entering elite educational spaces often demands a painful reshaping—even partial erasure—of the self.

    hooks describes growing up in a deeply religious working-class black family defined by economic scarcity and moral restraint. Her parents taught her not to expect luxury, comfort, or indulgence. Desire itself carried a faint odor of danger and shame. Material appetites were viewed not as healthy ambitions but as temptations capable of corrupting the soul. As a result, hooks explains that she learned “the art of sublimation and repression,” training herself to suppress wants, ambitions, and emotional needs in the name of survival and moral discipline.

    When she entered college close to home, she found herself stranded in an overwhelmingly white social environment populated by affluent young women whose values seemed completely foreign to her own. Many of these students treated her with ridicule, cruelty, and casual contempt. hooks describes them almost as alien life forms—young women so economically secure and psychologically entitled that they moved through the world with complete confidence in their own importance. They expressed their desires openly and unapologetically, behaving as though comfort, pleasure, beauty, and success were their birthrights.

    To the young hooks, raised in a culture of modesty and self-denial, this behavior was shocking. She associated upper-class aspiration with vanity, ostentation, envy, and cruelty. Yet she also recognized that these women possessed a kind of social confidence unavailable to her own world of repression and apology. Their existence revealed how class shapes not only material conditions but body language, speech, appetite, ambition, and assumptions about one’s place in the world.

    Not all of the white students fit this mold. hooks found friendship with several women from modest economic backgrounds who shared her skepticism toward vanity and excess. These relationships gave her temporary relief from the alienation surrounding her.

    Still miserable at the college, hooks encountered an English professor educated at Stanford University who encouraged her to leave and attend Stanford instead. Her parents reacted with terror. To them, California represented a modern Babylon where humility dissolved into narcissism, vanity, materialism, and sinful desire. Yet hooks could not imagine remaining at the all-white college. Stanford at least offered the possibility of intellectual and racial community, so she persuaded her parents to let her go west.

    Stanford overwhelmed her senses immediately. The campus radiated wealth, ambition, appetite, and institutional power. The architecture itself seemed to proclaim that greatness—especially economic greatness—was the natural destiny of those who studied there. hooks realized quickly that elite universities do not merely educate students academically; they train them socially and psychologically for membership within elite classes. Networking, status management, and the performance of confidence were woven into the institution’s culture as thoroughly as lectures and exams.

    The message Stanford communicated was unmistakable: if you were already wealthy, your job was to become even wealthier and more powerful. If you were poor, your task was to abandon the habits, assumptions, insecurities, and cultural signals associated with poverty and remake yourself in the image of the elite.

    Although hooks found less overt racism at Stanford, she encountered something she found equally disturbing: unapologetic class contempt. Wealthy students and professors openly mocked and dismissed working-class people. She recalls hearing students speak about poorer Americans with startling derision, as though poverty itself reflected stupidity, vulgarity, or moral failure.

    Most shocking to hooks was discovering that this elitism extended into segments of the black intellectual community as well. She describes encountering members of the “black diaspora” who displayed the same contempt toward the poor and working class that she had seen among affluent whites. Poverty was treated not merely as an economic condition but as a psychological defect requiring correction and purification. hooks realized that race alone did not guarantee solidarity; class divisions fractured black communities from within.

    Over time, hooks came to believe that academic success for poor students often requires a painful form of self-renunciation. To become educated within elite institutions meant learning new codes of speech, dress, posture, behavior, and intellectual performance. One had to absorb the language and cultural signals of the privileged classes while distancing oneself from working-class origins. In effect, students from poorer backgrounds often succeed only by engaging in a kind of controlled self-erasure.

    Education, then, becomes morally complicated. It is not simply enlightenment or liberation. It is also performance. Mimicry. Adaptation. Sycophancy. Reinvention.

    By the time hooks earned her doctorate and became a professor herself, she felt not uncomplicated pride but deep ambivalence. She had entered the world of privilege while remaining emotionally loyal to the working-class culture that shaped her identity. She occupied elite academic spaces while refusing to sever her connection to the people and values from which she came.

    I have had the privilege of teaching hooks’ essays to college students since the 1980s—across five different decades of teaching. Of all her works, “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class” remains my favorite because it exposes the emotional and psychological costs hidden beneath the mythology of higher education.

    Next semester, I plan to assign an essay asking students to evaluate the claim that hooks ultimately portrays higher education as a process requiring painful self-transformation. According to this interpretation, success in college often demands that students distance themselves from their past, imitate the language and cultural behaviors of professors and elites, and absorb the social signals associated with wealth and status. Education therefore becomes not merely intellectual growth, but a complicated mixture of genuine learning, shame, performance, ambition, self-betrayal, and social reinvention.

    Here is the 1,000-word argumentative essay prompt:

    In her essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” bell hooks presents higher education not simply as a path toward knowledge and liberation, but as a psychologically painful process of social transformation. As a working-class black woman moving through predominantly white and elite educational spaces, hooks experiences education as both empowering and alienating. She discovers that academic success often requires students from poorer or marginalized backgrounds to adopt new forms of speech, dress, behavior, ambition, and self-presentation associated with wealth and class privilege. At times, this transformation feels less like intellectual growth and more like self-erasure.

    hooks argues that elite colleges and universities do more than teach information. They also train students to perform class identity. Students learn not only what to think, but how to speak, dress, network, express ambition, suppress insecurity, and project confidence in ways that signal belonging within elite professional culture. For hooks, the process becomes morally complicated because upward mobility often demands distance from one’s family, working-class roots, cultural identity, or former self. Success may require what hooks describes as forms of repression, performance, mimicry, and reinvention.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you evaluate the following claim:

    To become successful and “educated” within elite academic culture, students from working-class or marginalized backgrounds often feel pressure to reinvent themselves by adopting the language, behaviors, attitudes, and social codes of the privileged classes, even when doing so creates feelings of shame, alienation, self-betrayal, or disconnection from their past.

    In your essay, analyze how hooks portrays education as both liberating and psychologically costly. To what extent do you agree with her argument? Does higher education genuinely expand human freedom and opportunity, or does it pressure students into performing a new identity in order to gain acceptance and success? Is adapting to elite academic culture a necessary form of growth and professional development, or does it require students to abandon important parts of themselves?

    As you develop your argument, you may consider some of the following questions:

    • How do class, race, and economic background shape a student’s experience in college?
    • What social “codes” do elite universities teach beyond academics?
    • Is there a difference between education and social performance?
    • Does professional success require conformity?
    • Can students remain loyal to their working-class roots while entering elite institutions?
    • Does higher education reward authenticity or performance?
    • Is self-reinvention a healthy form of growth or a form of self-betrayal?
    • How do speech, clothing, confidence, networking, and cultural tastes function as markers of class?
    • Are elite universities spaces of liberation, assimilation, or both?

    You may use personal observations, contemporary examples, films, books, interviews, or other sources to support your argument. Possible connections could include social media culture, networking culture, corporate professionalism, influencer culture, first-generation college experiences, code-switching, or the pressure to cultivate a “successful” personal brand.

    Requirements:

    • Clear argumentative thesis
    • At least three mapping components in the thesis
    • Counterargument and rebuttal
    • Specific references to hooks’ essay
    • MLA format
    • Approximately 1,000 words

    Your goal is not merely to summarize hooks’ experiences, but to evaluate the larger argument her essay makes about education, class mobility, identity, and the hidden emotional costs of social advancement.

  • The Cage Fight Republic

    The Cage Fight Republic

    There will be a cage fight on the White House lawn. Pause for a moment and absorb the sentence like a man discovering raccoons fighting in the baptismal font of a cathedral. Do not feel embarrassed if your mind immediately drifts toward the Fall of Rome. Historians spent centuries imagining civilization collapsing beneath barbarian invasions, moral decay, and imperial excess. Few predicted it would arrive draped in pay-per-view aesthetics, influencer branding, and energy-drink masculinity.

    What does a cage fight at the White House actually signify?

    It signifies that we are no longer functioning as a nation of adults. We are a nation of emotionally overstimulated adolescents sorted into hostile lifestyle cliques that glare at one another through glowing algorithmic windows. We no longer possess a shared civic culture grounded in restraint, seriousness, or critical thought. Instead, we perform identities. Politics has become an extension of influencer culture where the central goal is not governance, persuasion, or wisdom, but domination of the attention economy.

    The cage fight is not merely entertainment. It is symbolic theater. It codes to an entire lifestyle ecosystem built around aggression, masculine branding, tribal loyalty, and public humiliation as spectacle. It tells millions of people: This is power now. This is leadership. This is what seriousness looks like in the Age of Clout.

    Imagine the counterfactual. Suppose the ruling tribe consisted of affluent New Age wellness mystics from Marin County. The White House lawn would not host a cage fight. It would feature a guided meditation followed by a demonstration on preparing turmeric-infused plant-based pad Thai while ambient flute music drifted through the rose garden. The spectacle would be different, but the underlying pathology would remain the same: politics reduced to lifestyle signaling for competing narcissistic tribes.

    That is what modern America increasingly resembles—not a republic of citizens, but a federation of branded identities.

    Influencer culture has swallowed politics whole. Governance now competes with spectacle and usually loses. Complex realities requiring maturity, patience, expertise, and long-term thinking are bulldozed aside by tribal performance rituals engineered for virality. The purpose of public life is no longer solving problems but humiliating rival cliques in front of an audience.

    Meanwhile, reality continues operating with terrifying indifference to our social-media psychodramas.

    Ebola spreads through the Congo. Global instability intensifies. Public health systems strain under pressure. International crises require coordination, seriousness, and institutional competence. But a civilization addicted to clout interprets even catastrophe through the lens of performance and tribal signaling. Foreign aid becomes not a strategic necessity or humanitarian obligation, but an opportunity for symbolic muscle-flexing—to “own” the opposing tribe with maximum theatrical contempt.

    This is the deeper meaning of the White House cage fight.

    It is not simply vulgar. America has always possessed vulgarity. It is something worse: the collapse of adulthood itself. We increasingly approach politics the way middle-school students approach cafeteria warfare—emotionally reactive, tribal, narcissistic, and desperate for peer validation.

    So when you watch the spectacle unfold on the White House lawn, remember that the cage surrounding the fighters is not merely steel fencing. It is the visible architecture of a civilization slowly converting itself into content.

  • Essay Prompt: The Performance Trap: Online Identity, Narcissism, and the Collapse of the Real Self

    Essay Prompt: The Performance Trap: Online Identity, Narcissism, and the Collapse of the Real Self

    In the Netflix documentary The Crash and the Black Mirror episode “Joan Is Awful,” audiences witness characters whose lives become consumed by spectacle, performance, surveillance, and the relentless pressure of online visibility. While the two works differ in genre—one a real-life tragedy and the other a satirical dystopian drama—both raise disturbing questions about how modern digital culture reshapes identity, distorts reality, and erodes the boundary between authentic selfhood and online performance.

    In The Crash, the documentary suggests that Mackenzie Shirilla’s compulsive online self-curation reflected a deeper psychological unraveling in which image management, attention-seeking, and social media validation became inseparable from her sense of identity. Meanwhile, in “Joan Is Awful,” Joan discovers that her life has been transformed into a grotesque entertainment product streamed to millions of viewers, forcing her to confront the horrifying possibility that her real self has become secondary to a digitally manufactured persona designed for mass consumption. In both works, online visibility functions less as a tool for communication and more as a vortex that pulls individuals toward narcissism, performative behavior, emotional instability, and estrangement from reality itself.

    Write a 1,000-word argumentative essay in which you compare The Crash and “Joan Is Awful” to examine the claim that maintaining a constant online presence can suck people into a vortex of unhinged narcissism and madness that makes them unrecognizable from their authentic selves.

    Your essay should analyze how both works depict:

    • the transformation of identity into performance;
    • the addictive pursuit of attention, relevance, and validation;
    • the psychological consequences of constant self-curation and surveillance;
    • the collapse of the boundary between private life and public spectacle;
    • and the dangers of confusing online visibility with genuine human worth.

    You should also address the broader cultural implications of these works. What do these texts suggest about the modern relationship between technology and identity? Do social media platforms merely reveal narcissism already present in human nature, or do they actively manufacture and intensify it? At what point does self-expression become self-erasure?

    A strong essay will move beyond summary and develop a clear argumentative thesis that makes an original claim about the psychological and cultural dangers presented in both works. Your thesis should be supported by detailed analysis of scenes, dialogue, imagery, characterization, and thematic parallels between the documentary and the episode.

    You must include:

    • a clear and debatable thesis;
    • detailed comparison of both works;
    • at least one counterargument and rebuttal;
    • analysis of specific scenes and examples;
    • and thoughtful commentary about the relationship between technology, identity, and modern culture.

    Possible directions for argument include:

    • Social media transforms ordinary narcissism into pathological self-obsession.
    • Constant online performance erodes authentic identity and emotional stability.
    • Digital culture rewards outrage, exhibitionism, and emotional extremity.
    • Online validation creates a dopamine-driven cycle that destabilizes mental health.
    • Surveillance culture turns human beings into entertainment products.
    • The internet encourages people to construct marketable personas rather than genuine selves.

    You may agree, disagree, or complicate the prompt’s central argument, but your essay must directly engage the idea that online self-curation can psychologically deform individuals and distance them from reality.

    Requirements:

    • Approximately 1,000 words
    • MLA format
    • Clear introduction, body paragraphs, counterargument-rebuttal section, and conclusion
    • Use evidence from both The Crash and “Joan Is Awful”
    • Include a Works Cited page

    The strongest essays will avoid simplistic “technology bad” arguments and instead explore the more unsettling possibility that modern digital culture rewards the most performative, narcissistic, and emotionally unstable versions of ourselves until the performance eventually consumes the person behind it.

  • Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    Mackenzie Shirilla: The Girl Who Became Her Feed

    It was difficult to watch the Netflix documentary The Crash, which chronicles the horrifying case of two young men killed in a car crash after prosecutors argued that the driver, Mackenzie Shirilla, deliberately floored the gas pedal of her Toyota Camry to nearly one hundred miles per hour in an act deemed premeditated murder. The documentary is disturbing not merely because of the violence of the crash, but because of the portrait it paints of a young woman whose identity had become inseparable from her online performance. Mackenzie appeared trapped inside the exhausting machinery of self-curation, sculpting and broadcasting her existence with the kind of manic persistence social media now rewards as normal behavior. Her digital persona no longer seemed like an accessory to her life. It had metastasized into her life.

    Today, while listening to the podcast Blocked and Reported, I heard Jesse Singal and Katie Herzog discuss Gen Z’s eerie fluency for turning existence itself into a livestream. Both millennials sounded genuinely alienated by the phenomenon, as though they were describing a species only slightly adjacent to their own. Jesse referenced Mackenzie Shirilla’s relentless online presence as depicted in The Crash, pointing to the unsettling ease with which younger generations curate themselves for permanent digital exhibition. Yet one of the influencers discussed on the podcast commands nearly a million followers—a level of attention powerful enough to hijack almost any fragile human nervous system. Social media platforms have effectively industrialized validation, converting attention into a neurochemical slot machine that pays out in intermittent bursts of relevance, envy, and simulated affection.

    Attention itself is not the enemy. Human beings need recognition. Writers, artists, teachers, comedians, philosophers, and musicians all seek an audience because they are attempting to contribute something meaningful to the ongoing argument about what it means to be alive. But attention detached from substance becomes false gold. It glitters, intoxicates, and ultimately leaves the soul spiritually bankrupt. The dopamine cycle masquerades as significance while quietly hollowing out the self.

    The danger comes when a person can no longer distinguish between authentic identity and algorithmic performance. The online persona begins as branding, then evolves into compulsion, and finally hardens into pathology. It becomes louder, crueler, more narcissistic, and more detached from ordinary human proportion. The person starts living not for reality itself, but for its documentation. Meals become props. Relationships become content. Suffering becomes theater. Even grief gets optimized for engagement metrics. At that point, the self is no longer steering the machine; the machine is steering the self.

    Mackenzie Shirilla appears to have crossed that line. She allowed the curated self to consume the actual self. What remained was not individuality but a kind of digital possession—a consciousness warped by attention addiction, performative intensity, and emotional exhibitionism. The tragedy of The Crash is not merely that lives were destroyed in a violent instant. It is that modern culture increasingly trains young people to confuse visibility with meaning, performance with identity, and online relevance with human worth. Mackenzie lost that distinction entirely. In the end, the algorithm did not merely shape her personality. It devoured it.

  • This Is No Country for Old Men in Lycra

    This Is No Country for Old Men in Lycra

    No one warns you that approaching your mid-sixties feels less like aging and more like becoming technologically obsolete while still conscious enough to notice it. One day you are a functioning member of civilization; the next you are standing in a Costco parking lot wondering whether you already bought twelve gallons of trash bags or merely fantasized about buying them. You begin dropping references to Danish Go-Rounds, Screaming Yellow Zonkers, Tooter Turtle, and Super Chicken only to receive the same vacant stares one might reserve for a Civil War reenactor muttering battlefield coordinates.

    Meanwhile, your body begins quietly renegotiating its contract with reality.

    As a lifelong bodybuilder whose recovery now resembles a bankrupt public-works project—slow, inefficient, and riddled with delays—I understand how difficult it is to relinquish the fantasy of permanent vitality. Spend a week in Maui and the fantasy returns with tropical force. Hawaii is not merely a vacation destination. It is a pharmaceutical hallucination disguised as geography. You board a four-hundred-million-dollar jet, dry yourself into salted beef jerky for five hours, and land convinced that mortality itself has suffered a clerical error.

    Within twenty-four hours you are marinating in mai tais, vaporizing lilikoi pie with devotional intensity, and sitting beneath sunsets so offensively beautiful they seem personally designed by God to restore your self-esteem. Time dissolves. Deadlines vanish. Your phone feels vulgar. Maui whispers into your ear like a luxury hypnotist: Relax. Death can’t locate you here.

    Which is why leaving the island feels psychologically violent.

    You are not simply returning to California. You are returning to spam emails, lower-back stiffness, Costco receipts, cholesterol panels, and the humiliating realization that gravity remains undefeated. For weeks afterward you wander through suburbia in a tropical narcotic haze while your neighbor’s leaf blower screams through the morning air like dental equipment excavating a wisdom tooth from your skull. Maui is less a place than a controlled substance for affluent aging people desperate to suspend disbelief.

    It is also a theater of curated immortality.

    Old men roam the beaches in tiny Lycra swim briefs with the confidence of Roman emperors who somehow survived into the Ozempic era. Their skin resembles expensive leather luggage abandoned too long in the sun, yet they strut beside trophy wives young enough to think dial-up internet was a Bronze Age inconvenience. Wealth, GLP-1 drugs, testosterone clinics, cosmetic dentistry, peptide injections, and Hawaiian sunlight collaborate to create the illusion that biology has become negotiable.

    I remember one grotesque specimen vividly from the summer of 2019: a compact man in his mid-seventies parading through Maui in dark-blue Speedos beside a Mediterranean twenty-something so beautiful she looked less like a spouse and more like an acquisition. He moved with the frantic confidence of a hedge-fund satyr convinced that constant motion itself could keep death wheezing several yards behind him. He dove into the surf not like a swimmer but like a man bargaining with Time.

    You could smell his wealth before you could smell the salt air.

    The strange thing was not the age gap. Human vanity has always outsourced dignity whenever money allows it. No, what fascinated me was the unmistakable misalignment of the tableau. The forced smiles. The awkward touches. The overcompensating strut. It did not feel like youth preserved. It felt like youth taxidermied.

    And this, I increasingly realize, is the central agony of aging in modern America: not decline itself, but visible misalignment with the surrounding culture.

    You can fight it. God knows I do. You can swallow vats of omega-3 fish oil, consume two hundred grams of protein a day, swing kettlebells in the garage, and polish yourself into the rough approximation of a man twenty years younger. But eventually biology leaks through the cracks. Your night vision deteriorates. Downtown Los Angeles traffic begins to resemble a psychedelic military simulation. Google Maps betrays you into six-lane intersections populated by homicidal scooters, distracted pedestrians, and pastel-lit Waymo vehicles gliding through the streets like cheerful robot hearses escorting you toward irrelevance.

    That realization hit me hardest while driving my wife and twin daughters to Camp Flog Gnaw, a music festival whose title sounds less like an entertainment event and more like a medieval punishment device. Downtown Los Angeles unfolded before me like a gladiatorial arena engineered specifically to eliminate men my age. The traffic signals appeared designed by schizophrenic graphic designers. Pedestrians hurled themselves into intersections like feral pigeons auditioning for lawsuits. By the time I dropped my family off, I leaned toward my wife and quietly informed her that I was considering retirement from driving altogether.

    They did not laugh.

    Because they’ve begun noticing the cracks too.

    And this is where the Speedo delusion enters the story.

    Give a man enough money, enough Ozempic, enough oceanfront property, and enough panic about aging, and eventually he will parade across a Maui beach in Lycra briefs convinced he has conquered time itself. But the spectacle never communicates triumph. It communicates fear. The tighter the Speedo, the louder the desperation.

    You can optimize the body. You can chemically suppress appetite. You can biohack your sleep, inject peptides into your abdomen, freeze your face, laser your skin, and marry someone young enough to regard Nirvana as “classic rock.” But eventually the truth arrives anyway: youth culture is moving in one direction while you are moving in another.

    No amount of Hawaiian sunlight can conceal the gap forever.

  • Lost in the Cerealverse

    Lost in the Cerealverse

    I am a recovering Baby Boomer, a man spending his adult life in slow convalescence from my generation’s excesses, delusions, appetites, and spectacular lapses in judgment. We were a gullible people, easily hypnotized by charisma, pseudoscience, and televised absurdity. We watched self-proclaimed psychic Uri Geller bend spoons on The Merv Griffin Show while audiences reacted as though Moses himself had just parted the Red Sea with silverware. We read The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and became convinced our begonias possessed emotional needs and that our geraniums required not merely sunlight and water but emotional affirmation and perhaps a little Barry Manilow. We devoured comic-book advertisements promising Charles Atlas physiques, X-ray vision, and Sea Monkeys sophisticated enough to establish maritime republics. Television commercials showed eager blondes like Farrah Fawcett rubbing shaving cream onto the cheeks of Joe Namath while exhausted housewives suffered public humiliation for failing to remove “ring around the collar.” Even bad breath became a moral catastrophe. One whiff of halitosis and television implied your marriage, career, social standing, and perhaps your begonias would collapse simultaneously.

    Then came the great cultural psychedelicization of suburbia. We witnessed Woodstock, ogled at Hugh Hefner’s satin-lined Pleasure Palace, and absorbed the full narcotic force of Hair. I can personally testify that once “The Age of Aquarius” entered the bloodstream of my San Jose neighborhood, things deteriorated rapidly. One moment neighbors were making peach preserves while drinking Florence Henderson-approved Tang beneath respectable patio umbrellas. The next moment those same backyards had been transformed into hot-tub diplomacy zones populated by nudists, swingers, divorcees, and mustachioed men named Skip discussing transcendental meditation beside tiki torches. Divorces multiplied like mushrooms after rain. Wheat germ became mandatory. Tanning without sunscreen evolved into a civic religion. Entire adults developed an inexplicable longing to go on tour with The Partridge Family. We were sold a vision of freedom defined almost entirely by consumer pleasure-seeking, and like gullible Labradors chasing a tennis ball off a cliff, we lunged after it enthusiastically.

    To this day, Boomers remain burdened by what can only be described as a Hydra-headed collection of addictions, nostalgias, and narcissistic compulsions. We benefited from affordable housing, cheap college tuition, generous job markets, and an economy that still allowed mediocrity to purchase a respectable ranch home with avocado-colored appliances. Yet instead of building ladders for future generations, many of us climbed upward and kicked the rungs away behind us while lecturing younger people about “hard work.” Retirement only intensifies the pathology. Rather than volunteering or developing civic virtue, many Boomers retreat into nostalgia pageants. They attend fantasy baseball camps where aging Hall of Famers teach sixty-eight-year-old insurance salesmen how to bunt. They go on African safaris and return home narrating their adventures in the booming voice of Commander McBragg. They attend The Rolling Stones concerts hoping the pelvic gyrations of octogenarian rock stars will somehow exempt them from mortality itself. Culture critics have noticed all this and responded with flamethrowers. Bruce Cannon Gibney portrays Boomers as empathy-deficient sociopaths in A Generation of Sociopaths. Lyman Stone argues we ruined everything. Jim Tankersley accuses us of devouring resources and fleeing responsibility like drunken Vikings looting the treasury. Meanwhile Joe Queenan observed that Boomers possess the supernatural ability to transform even the most banal activities into monumental spiritual “events” requiring extensive planning, emotional reflection, and enough data analysis to launch a moon mission.

    As someone born near the tail end of the Baby Boom in 1961, I would now like to contribute my own testimony to the prosecution. My story concerns cereal. But the word cereal is hopelessly inadequate for describing the psychological labyrinth into which my generation willingly wandered. Cereal sounds harmless, like something discussed by dietitians or dentists. No, what consumed us was something far larger and more immersive: the Cerealverse. To become lost in the Cerealverse is to undergo a form of infantilization in which the rituals, mascots, sugar rushes, and comforting repetitions of childhood cease being temporary pleasures and instead become an entire operating system for adult life. You believe you are moving forward, maturing, evolving. In reality, you are merely orbiting the same tiny constellation of appetites and nostalgic comforts over and over again like a trapped satellite incapable of escape. The Cerealverse does not merely feed you. It suspends you in a permanent state of emotional adolescence while convincing you that your stagnation is happiness.

    I can’t talk about infantilization without mentioning Cap ‘N Crunch. My mother indulged my appetite for this sugary cereal and bought me all its variations: Cap ‘N Crunch with Crunch Berries, Peanut Butter Cap ‘N Crunch, and then the renamed versions of the same-tasting cereal: Quisp, Quake, and King Vitamin. Quaker cereals took their winning formula of corn and brown sugar flavors and sold several variations with different mascots and names. 

    As a kid watching these cereals being advertised on TV, it was clear that too much of a good thing was not a problem. On the contrary, I felt compelled to taste-test all these cereal varieties the way a sommelier would taste dozens of Zinfandel wines from the same region or a musicologist would listen to hundreds of different versions of Rachmaninoff’s Second Symphony.

    Eating six versions of Cap ‘N Crunch afforded me the illusion of variety while eating the same cereal over and over. I was a preadolescent boy who wanted to believe I had choices but at the same time didn’t want any choices. 

    You will sometimes hear about the man who is in his sixth marriage, and his wives in terms of appearance, temperament, and personality are all more or less the same. The man keeps going back to the same woman but wants to believe he has “found someone new” to give him the hope of a new life. 

    What you are witnessing is infantilization, the illusion that you are moving forward when in fact you are trapped in a Moebius strip. A Möbius strip creates the illusion of movement while trapping you inside the same continuous surface forever. You keep traveling forward, yet mysteriously return to the exact psychological point where you began. The horror of the Möbius strip is not that it stops you from moving. The horror is that it allows you to move forever while never truly arriving anywhere.

    To illustrate this horror properly, allow me to transport you back to the late 1970s when I worked as a bouncer at Maverick’s Disco in San Ramon, California. The job paid the princely sum of three dollars an hour—roughly ten cents above minimum wage—which at the time felt like entrance into the capitalist elite. The compensation package also included unlimited soft drinks and nightly exposure to enough polyester jumpsuits, platform shoes, and chemically fortified feathered hairdos to trigger multiple fire-code violations simultaneously. At first I considered the job a masterstroke of efficiency. I was killing two birds with one stone: earning money while prowling the disco floor performing involuntary lat spreads in tight shirts, all while socializing with an endless parade of beautiful women marinated in Jean Naté, cigarette smoke, and disco lighting. Like Cap’n Crunch, the disco promised nonstop excitement, sugar-rush pleasure, and cartoon happiness. But beneath the glitter and bass lines lurked something much darker than depression. It produced anhedonia—the condition in which the brain becomes so overexposed to stimulation that pleasure itself begins to short-circuit. When I think of anhedonia now, I think immediately of Maverick’s Disco.

    Because every night at the disco was supposedly “another exciting night,” yet every night was exactly the same. The same swaggering men in open-collared satin shirts. The same women adjusting their mascara beneath bathroom mirrors. The same Bee Gees songs vibrating through nicotine fog. The same desperate hunt for validation disguised as fun. Over time, the repetition became spiritually suffocating. Humanity itself began to look repetitive, fraudulent, vain, and emotionally trapped inside a giant behavioral loop. Working there reminded me strangely of the moment I stopped enjoying The Flintstones as a child. One afternoon I noticed that while Fred and Barney drove their stone-age car down the highway, the background scenery—trees, rocks, buildings—repeated endlessly in a looping cycle. Once I saw the wraparound background, the illusion collapsed permanently. I was no longer watching prehistoric adventure. I was watching cost-cutting animation techniques. The magic died instantly. Maverick’s Disco produced the same revelation. Every Friday and Saturday night I watched customers arrive radiating grand expectations of glamour, romance, transcendence, and reinvention. Then at closing time I watched those same faces stumble toward the parking lot glazed over with exhaustion, disappointment, loneliness, and stale gin. Yet the following weekend they returned to repeat the ritual all over again like worshippers trapped in a polyester Möbius strip. At some point I realized the disco itself had become the wraparound background of my own life, and that realization terrified me. I understood dimly that I did not merely need to quit the job. I needed to escape an entire stagnant mode of existence before I calcified inside it permanently.

    Sadly, escaping the Cerealverse—or any form of infantilized comfort addiction—is never so simple. The programming begins early. The imprinting runs deep. Even now, navigating my sixties, I remain vulnerable to the gravitational pull of bowls filled with sugary mush and edible nostalgia. Much of the blame belongs to Euell Gibbons, the patron saint of crunchy Boomer mysticism. Gibbons presented himself as a woodland prophet—a bearded naturalist survival guru who appeared in commercials for Grape-Nuts explaining with dead-serious authority that many parts of a pine tree were edible. This bizarre botanical trivia somehow qualified him, in the minds of millions of Boomers, to lecture the nation about nutrition and moral virtue. The subliminal message was unmistakable: eat Grape-Nuts and you too could survive alone in the wilderness wearing nothing but a loincloth and carrying a buck knife. Never mind that the cereal itself possessed the texture of roofing gravel and was responsible for enough chipped molars to enrich the American dental industry for decades. Eating Grape-Nuts produced a crunch so violent it could drown out the kitchen radio. Yet none of that mattered because the Boomer generation elevated cereal consumption into a kind of spiritual discipline. Granola, wheat germ, and gravel-like fiber clusters ceased being mere breakfast foods and evolved into moral performances, edible declarations that one was enlightened, natural, spiritually purified, and metabolically superior to the unwashed masses whose kitchen cabinets were not overflowing with mason jars of buckwheat groats, flaxseed meal, carob powder, and steel-cut oatmeal dense enough to patch potholes in municipal highways.

    It is impossible to contemplate the Cerealverse without returning to the early 1970s when my family shopped at a San Francisco Bay Area grocery store called Co-Op, a market proudly advertised as “owned by the people,” which gave the place the atmosphere of a food store crossed with a minor political uprising. The employees were unnervingly friendly. Many of the men had beards thick enough to shelter migratory birds and wore wilderness gear purchased from the store’s adjoining “Wilderness Supply Store,” a retail annex catering to customers who wished to survive both societal collapse and a weekend camping trip near Mount Tamalpais. Everyone at Co-Op seemed to exist somewhere on the Hippy Spectrum, ranging from mellow acoustic-guitar environmentalist to full-blown anti-capitalist survival mystic. The store boasted the town’s first daycare center for children while parents shopped and the first recycling center long before suburban America learned to pretend it cared about the planet. Alongside bins of organic produce sat a modest but influential bookstore stocked with sacred countercultural scripture: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, The Secret Life of Plants, Chariots of the Gods?, The Peter Principle, and towering above them all like the Vegetarian Torah itself, Diet for a Small Planet. The food inventory looked less like groceries than supplies for an agrarian uprising: carob honey ice cream, wheat germ, granola, brown rice, tofu, Japanese yams, and alfalfa-sprout cultivation kits complete with mason jars so suburbanites could grow revolutionary vegetation beside their kitchen sinks.

    Co-Op was therefore more than a grocery store. It was a sanctuary for people rebelling against what they ominously called The Man. Eating granola drenched in organic honey was not merely breakfast but a political declaration, a crunchy repudiation of corporate America performed with wooden spoons and sandals. Every overflowing bowl of wheat germ signaled moral superiority over the poor unenlightened masses still eating Wonder Bread and Frosted Flakes beneath the fluorescent tyranny of Safeway. Yet the movement possessed a glaring contradiction large enough to require its own waistline. For all their rhetoric about health, moderation, and spiritual purification, many of these granola apostles suffered from a condition I came to think of as Granola Belly. They consumed calorie-dense granola, wheat germ, honey, nuts, seeds, and carob desserts with the evangelical intensity of people who believed organic calories somehow obeyed different laws of thermodynamics. As I wandered the aisles with my parents, I observed these rotund revolutionaries waddling past bins of lentils and herbal teas, their expanding stomachs bouncing beneath ponchos and safari vests while they discussed sustainable farming and the evils of processed sugar between bites of honey-coated granola containing enough caloric density to sustain minor civilizations.

    Looking back, the granola faithful of the Co-Op era were the spiritual ancestors of a distinctly Boomer contradiction: the fusion of lofty ideals with spectacular self-indulgence. They strutted through their people-owned utopia imagining themselves guerrilla warriors in the battle against corporate oppression while simultaneously consuming enough “natural” food to feed small Scandinavian fishing villages. Their granola bowls became sacramental objects, edible proof of enlightenment and rebellion. Yet like so many Boomer crusades, the movement eventually collapsed beneath the weight of its own appetites. They denounced consumer culture while buying fifty-pound sacks of artisanal oats. They preached moderation while drowning yogurt in rivers of organic honey. They fantasized about escaping modern decadence while polishing off entire tubs of carob ice cream. Their growing bellies became physical manifestations of a generation uniquely skilled at confusing indulgence with liberation. Nothing better captures the Boomer spirit than a man in hiking boots and a macramé vest lecturing others about corporate tyranny while absentmindedly eating twelve hundred calories of “healthy” granola.

    Like those self-indulgent Boomer hippies waddling through Co-Op with honey in their beards and granola in their intestines, I too became trapped inside the Cerealverse. My attraction was not merely to cereal’s sugary, infantile comfort but to its deeper promise: the fantasy of a frictionless existence. As a preadolescent boy fantasizing about growing into a baseball slugger with the heroic bulk of Reggie Jackson and Greg Luzinski, I imagined myself living as a carefree bachelor whose weekly grocery shopping consisted entirely of loading a cart with towering stacks of cereal boxes—Froot Loops, Sugar Pops, Cap’n Crunch, Count Chocula, and whatever other brightly colored sugar delivery systems the cereal industry was using to infantilize America’s youth. In my fantasy, adulthood was not about responsibility, marriage, or civic engagement. It was about ease. Convenience. Minimal friction between appetite and gratification. My spiritual guide for this philosophy was Uncle Norman from The Courtship of Eddie’s Father. In one episode, Uncle Norman explained to young Eddie that he had discovered the secret to avoiding dishes and wasting time at the dinner table: eat every meal standing over the kitchen sink. Demonstrating the method by consuming an entire head of lettuce directly above the drain basin, Norman proudly explained that his technique eliminated unnecessary cleanup, table setting, and other exhausting rituals associated with civilization itself. At that moment my brain detonated with revelation. The Uncle Norman Method became not merely a humorous TV gimmick but a governing life principle that would shape my habits, aspirations, and psychological orientation for decades.

    Aspiring to become a disciple of Uncle Norman, I began envisioning an entire lifestyle engineered around minimizing friction with reality. Why make a bed when a sleeping bag could simply be flopped across the mattress indefinitely like a tarp covering abandoned machinery? Why water plants when plastic foliage required no emotional commitment? Why learn to cook when cereal, toast, bananas, and yogurt cartons could sustain human existence with minimal labor? I planned to work within a five-mile radius of my home and only date women living inside my zip code because romance should never involve excessive driving. I saw no need for a laundry hamper since dirty clothes could be deposited directly into the washing machine drum until a sufficient mound accumulated to justify pressing START. Color coordination became unnecessary because I would own only black clothing, transforming my wardrobe into the textile equivalent of a low-budget European art film. Since bedsheets themselves struck me as unnecessary complications, the linen closet could instead house protein powder, brewer’s yeast, and protein bars. Grocery shopping would always occur during low-traffic morning hours to avoid crowds and unnecessary human interaction. Before entering restaurants, I would study menus online with military diligence so I could order instantly without burdening waiters or fellow diners with indecision. The moment the bill arrived, my credit card would already be positioned and ready for extraction like a gunslinger preparing for a duel. Most importantly, I vowed never to own a truck because trucks attract acquaintances who suddenly remember your existence whenever couches need moving.

    It is painfully clear to me now that the Uncle Norman Method emerged directly from the Cerealverse and that its deeper logic depended upon disengagement from the world itself. Infantilization, after all, is partly a yearning to return to the womb—to retreat from complexity, responsibility, unpredictability, and emotional entanglement. Depression often disguises itself as convenience. You tell yourself you are simplifying your life when in reality you are shrinking it. The Uncle Norman Method was not really about efficiency. It was about withdrawal. It was a way of quietly informing the world: “I can no longer process your noise, obligations, and chaos. I am dimming the lights, retreating into my cave, and marinating in my routines. Please do not disturb me unless absolutely necessary.” There is an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry remarks that a man wearing gray sweatpants in public is essentially announcing that he has given up on life. Cereal as a staple food operates the same way. A bowl of cereal declares that the effort required to create a meal exceeds your emotional willingness to participate in existence. The Uncle Norman Method therefore was not enlightened minimalism. It was glorified laziness camouflaging exhaustion, melancholy, and retreat from adulthood beneath the sugary crunch of processed grain.

    I can assure you that as a man in his sixties with a wife and teenage daughters, behaviors aligned with the Uncle Norman Method are not greeted as signs of enlightened efficiency. They are treated more like symptoms requiring intervention. By Friday evening I am often so psychologically depleted from the workweek that the very idea of preparing dinner or driving somewhere for takeout feels like being assigned a humanitarian relief mission in a war zone. In these moments, the seductive logic of the Cerealverse returns with full narcotic force. More than once I have proposed what I considered a magnificent family innovation: “Oatmeal Night.” I present the concept with the enthusiasm of a Silicon Valley disruptor unveiling revolutionary technology. “Picture it,” I proclaim. “A glorious oatmeal bar! A Dutch oven filled with perfectly cooked steel-cut oats. Glass bowls overflowing with blueberries, bananas, diced sweet potatoes, walnuts, pecans, raisins, chocolate chips—an evening of rustic abundance and nutritional splendor!” My family responds as though I have proposed surviving winter inside a roadside bunker while rationing grain during the Dust Bowl. Their synchronized eye rolls contain a single unified message: Dad is once again trying to convert exhaustion into philosophy. They refuse to participate in my retreat from civilization disguised as Scandinavian peasant cuisine.

    Because to live inside the Cerealverse is ultimately a form of exile. It is separation—not merely from cooking, effort, or dishes—but from life itself. I am reminded of something Stephen Colbert once said while discussing hell with Bill Maher. Colbert remarked that hell is separation from God. That definition stayed with me because it perfectly describes the spiritual condition of the Cerealverse. To be trapped there is to become severed from vitality, intimacy, effort, sensuality, and communal joy. You become disconnected from the very things that make existence rich and earthly. Fortunately, if there exists such a condemned state, there must also exist its opposite—a glimpse of heaven. To understand that heaven, we must travel back to 1969 and the first time I tasted homemade salsa. Our neighbors, Mike and Felice Orozco, made salsa entirely from ingredients grown in nearby backyard gardens. The salsa sat upon the coffee table inside a volcanic-looking tureen as though it were some sacred artifact requiring both reverence and caution. You could smell it the instant you entered the house: chilies, onions, garlic, tomatoes—alive, aggressive, unapologetically real. The aroma alone made every jarred supermarket salsa taste like liquefied bureaucracy.

    And then there was the color. Not the synthetic red of restaurant chains or the dull industrial redness of mass production, but a deep ruby crimson possessing the vivid authority of something born directly from sun, soil, sweat, and care. I have eaten excellent salsa across decades of restaurants and dinner tables, but nothing has ever equaled the salsa Felice Orozco taught my mother to make in the late 1960s. Even now, when a Mexican restaurant serves a salsa remotely approaching that standard—even halfway—I regard it as evidence of moral seriousness in the kitchen. Because Felice Orozco’s salsa was never merely food. It was philosophy disguised as a condiment. It carried within it a quiet but radical argument about what matters in human life. Families passing down recipes are not merely exchanging ingredients; they are transmitting devotion, memory, discipline, continuity, and love. 

    Unlike the frictionless emptiness promised by the Cerealverse, this salsa required labor, patience, mess, participation, and community. There was nothing optimized about it. No shortcuts. No convenience strategy. Just human beings gathering together, giving their time, energy, and affection to produce something fleeting and beautiful. That salsa was a masterpiece not because it was authentic, artisanal, or fashionable, but because it was made by people who cared about one another deeply enough to create something unforgettable together.

    As someone who has spent decades trapped inside the Cerealverse and beholden to the Uncle Norman Method, I can assure you that Felice Orozco’s salsa was love itself, a gift from God. 

  • Swamp Creature

    Swamp Creature

    When my wife and I had twins in 2010, she insisted they attend preschool. I argued that preschool was unnecessary and vaguely ridiculous, little more than an expensive holding pen filled with finger paint, gluten-free crackers, and parents humblebragging about their toddlers’ “advanced verbal skills.” My wife countered that I was thinking like a Boomer who had grown up in a civilization where childhood still contained dead zones of unstructured time and where kindergarten did not resemble an Ivy League admissions process. In today’s world, she explained, failing to place your children in preschool was viewed almost as a form of negligence because children were expected to arrive at kindergarten already preloaded with socialization protocols, emotional vocabulary, and rudimentary STEM competencies. 

    What she was really telling me was something far larger and more unsettling: I came from an era so saturated with available time that it shaped not merely our schedules but our consciousness itself. Back then, the American Dream still felt obtainable without turning every waking hour into an optimization project. We had entire Sundays available for glorious wastefulness. Families would leave home at nine in the morning and spend the entire day at the Oakland Coliseum watching double-header baseball games under the blazing sun, eating colossal hot dogs drowning in mustard and sauerkraut, spilling popcorn across their laps, and sitting through nine-hour marathons of suspense, boredom, beer fumes, arguments with umpires, and fireworks erupting over the outfield at night. Nobody returned home resentful about “losing a day.” The whole point was to lose it.

    Only a fool from my generation would lecture younger people today about “slowing down” or offer some suffocating Hallmark bromide about stopping to smell the roses. We had the luxury of wasting time because economically and culturally the walls had not yet closed in around us. Housing costs had not yet mutated into intergenerational psychological warfare. Child-rearing had not yet become a hypercompetitive résumé-building campaign beginning at age three. 

    Boomers were spoiled in ways we barely understood, and part of being spoiled is existing without boundaries while believing such freedom is morally normal. Even our forms of wasting time were fundamentally different from today’s digital diversions. Squandering your life doomscrolling through TikTok or vaporizing hours inside algorithmic entertainment ecosystems produces a particular kind of dehumanization because every click, pause, and emotional twitch is harvested, quantified, and monetized. Your wasted life becomes data. By contrast, losing yourself for ten hours at a baseball game, a shopping mall, or wandering around town with friends had a strange earthly grandeur to it. You felt embedded in the physical world rather than absorbed into invisible software architecture. Even idleness carried a feeling of privilege, expansiveness, and freedom.

    Parents in my era barely supervised their children at all, which now sounds less like parenting and more like a federally unsanctioned wilderness experiment. After breakfast we were effectively jettisoned into the outdoors like feral raccoons and not expected home until dinner. Our parents had only the vaguest idea where we were, what we were doing, or whether we remained technically alive. We rode bicycles through construction sites littered with exposed nails, lumber piles, electrical wire, and trenches deep enough to conceal small military operations. We launched homemade ramps over creeks in reckless attempts to imitate Evel Knievel. We trespassed through cow pastures, ravines, and forbidden properties specifically because they were marked with rusty barbed-wire fences and gigantic DO NOT ENTER signs that functioned less as deterrents than invitations to glory. We were chased by bulls, guard dogs, furious ranchers, and occasionally pellet-gun fire. We built forts, detonated firecrackers, swung from vines, crashed into poison oak, and stumbled upon rattlesnakes, black widows, coyotes, bobcats, and the occasional mountain lion. Then at night we returned home filthy, bleeding lightly, and coated in dust while our parents merely instructed us to take a bath before inhaling enormous portions of meatloaf, chili, tacos, and turkey pot pies so we’d possess enough calories to resume our campaign of reckless mayhem the next morning. 

    There is something about boys left alone for huge stretches of time in woods, fields, and ravines that sends the imagination into overdrive. The chaos, enchantment, stupidity, and myth-making generated by unsupervised childhood cannot be replicated inside carefully managed schedules overseen by anxious adults armed with hydration packs and developmental benchmarks.

    This abundance of time made people of my generation feel special in ways that are difficult to explain to those raised in later eras of acceleration, optimization, and perpetual anxiety. Because time felt plentiful, life itself felt expansive. You could drift. You could loiter. You could waste entire afternoons wandering shopping malls, watching baseball games, sitting in diners, riding bicycles nowhere in particular, or staring at the ceiling listening to records without feeling the moral panic that you were “falling behind.” 

    But that feeling of abundance carried hidden dangers. Comfort can seduce a person into passivity. Your environment begins shaping you slowly, almost imperceptibly, the way coral spreads across a reef. Little by little, routines harden around you. What once felt like freedom quietly calcifies into a loss of agency.

    This story is really about the gradual loss of agency—or more precisely, how close I came to surrendering it completely. I had too much time, too little supervision, and a desperate hunger for identity, so I drifted into Walt’s Gym believing it was a sanctuary where boys became men through discipline, suffering, and muscle. In reality, it was something far stranger and more dangerous. It was the equivalent of the island in The Adventures of Pinocchio where wayward boys are seduced into becoming donkeys, only our transformation occurred beneath flickering fluorescent lights amid mildew, barbells, and the smell of stale protein shakes. We thought we were forging ourselves into superior beings, but slowly the environment began shaping us instead. The gym’s mythology, vanity, arrested development, and obsessive rituals accumulated over us like swamp sediment until many of us lost the ability to distinguish self-creation from self-entrapment. In my case, I did not become a donkey. I became something more amphibious—a creature half human, half swamp thing, marinating for years in a fetid ecosystem of male insecurity while mistaking that slow psychological calcification for transcendence. 

    By the time I was fourteen in 1976, Walt’s Gym had become my personal Mothership, where my lifeblood beat and I felt the life force raging inside of me. The gym was in Hayward, California—a hallowed hall of iron that had started its humble life as a chicken coop in the 1950s. 

    The gym was a biological catastrophe masquerading as a fitness facility, a steaming swamp of fungus, bacteria, mildew, and human despair waiting to colonize the flesh of the unwary. The locker room floors glistened with suspicious moisture that no mop, prayer, or municipal intervention could ever fully eradicate. Members spoke in hushed, traumatized tones about incurable cases of athlete’s foot and whispered of fungal strains so exotic and aggressive that even the world’s most decorated mycologists would recoil in professional defeat. Men entered the showers with healthy skin and emerged looking as though they had contracted diseases previously encountered only by sailors returning from cursed islands in the South Pacific.

    Somewhere inside this microbial wetland allegedly lived an enormous frog the professional wrestlers had affectionately named Charlie. Charlie supposedly lurked among the fungal shower stalls like the gym’s amphibious patron saint. Though I never personally saw him, the wrestlers swore he existed. They described him with such conviction that I found myself wondering whether Charlie was real or merely a hallucination conjured by men who had absorbed too many chair shots to the skull. Perhaps Charlie was not literally a frog at all but a prophetic vision born from the gym’s diseased subconscious. The longer I trained there, the more plausible this theory became.

    After all, what were we becoming ourselves?

    We marinated daily inside this fetid ecosystem breathing mold spores, soaking in swamp humidity, and absorbing the psychic residue of failed marriages, steroid rage, and protein-induced flatulence. Like Pinocchio slowly transforming into a donkey through moral corruption, perhaps we too were undergoing a grotesque metamorphosis. Given enough years beneath flickering fluorescent lights, enough fungal exposure, enough sets of squats and bench presses performed in the gym bog, perhaps we would all eventually evolve into bloated amphibious creatures squatting permanently beside mildew-coated drains.

    Perhaps Charlie was not the gym mascot.

    Perhaps Charlie was our future.

    The locker room was perpetually occupied by a cast of characters who seemed to have wandered out of a grimy noir film. There was always some bankrupt divorcee draped in a velour top and gold chain, hogging the payphone for marathon sessions with his attorney, discussing the bleakest of life choices and the staggering attorney fees required to sweep his sordid past under the rug.

    Out back was an unused swimming pool, its water murky and black, a cauldron of plague and dead rats. Walt, the gym’s owner, had a peculiar ritual. On occasion, he would stroll outside, brandishing a pool net like a scepter, scoop up some unfortunate deceased creature, and hold it aloft for all to see. This grim ceremony was invariably met with a thunderous round of applause from the gym-goers, after which Walt would toss the cadaver into a nearby dumpster and take an exaggerated bow as if he were performing some grand Shakespearean drama.

    Walt’s Gym also boasted a lonely octogenarian named Wally, who claimed to be the model for human anatomy textbooks. Wally’s routine was nothing short of legendary: He would work out for hours, then spend an equal amount of time in the sauna and shower, concluding his ritual with a complete-body talcum powder treatment. When he spoke to you, he did so embalmed in a giant talcum cloud, a ghostly specter of gym dedication.

    The radio played the same hits on a relentless loop: Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship.” As a kid navigating an adult world, the gym was my barbershop, a public square where I eavesdropped on conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the staggering costs of sending kids to college, and the burdens of caring for elderly parents.

    It dawned on me then that I was at fourteen the perfect age: old enough to grow big and strong, yet young enough to be spared the drudgery and tedium of adult life. The consequences of making the gym my second home, I realized, was never growing up. The gym encouraged me to cling to the juvenile dream of muscle-bound glory and to sidestep the soul-crushing responsibilities that awaited the grown-ups.

    One of the twisted delights of haunting Walt’s Gym in the mid-70s was rubbing shoulders with Big Time Wrestling stars who looked like they had been plucked straight off my TV screen and dropped into my sweaty, adolescent reality. Training next to legends like Kinji Shibuya, Pedro Morales, and Hector Cruz was a dream—until my big mouth and cluelessness repeatedly turned it into a farcical nightmare.

    Despite sporting muscles aplenty for a fourteen-year-old, I was hopelessly deficient in common sense. Case in point: during a cable lat row session with Hector Cruz, I naively mentioned that I’d heard rumors wrestling was fake. Hector, his forehead etched with jagged scars like some sort of horrifying topographical map, shot back, “Look at these scars on my face! Do they look fake to you?” I silently pondered how plastic surgery could be a pretty convincing art form.

    Another day, I spotted a random towel draped over the calf machine and, deciding it was fair game, used it to mop my sweaty brow. Within seconds, a man who looked like he bench-pressed trucks for breakfast sprang off his bench press, accusing me of towel theft and threatening to deliver a comprehensive ass-whooping if I weren’t such a dumb kid. Lesson learned: gym towels are not community property, and swiping one is akin to committing grand larceny.

    But my greatest gym faux pas involved my enthusiastic grunting and screaming during heavy lifts. Thinking my primal roars added a touch of drama to my workouts, I was oblivious to the irritation I was causing. That is, until a competitive bodybuilder, with muscles on his muscles and a glare that could melt steel, took me aside. He explained that my caveman screams were fraying the nerves of the other gym-goers, and if I didn’t tone it down, one of them would gladly pummel me into silence, likely to the cheers of the entire gym.

    I discovered that surviving Walt’s Gym wasn’t just about lifting heavy weights; it was about adhering to an unspoken social contract where courtesy and modesty were essential currencies. Failure to comply meant facing the very real possibility of an ass-beating, a lesson I learned the hard way while navigating the gladiatorial arena of mid-70s bodybuilding.

    Another defining feature of the gym was the strange brotherhood formed around a common obsession. Every regular member had seen Pumping Iron, and after seeing it, none of us were ever quite the same again. Before the film, we merely possessed a vague desire to become bigger, stronger, and somehow more formidable than ordinary civilians trapped in the soft upholstered world outside the gym doors. But after witnessing Arnold Schwarzenegger on the screen, our obsession acquired theology. Arnold was no longer merely a bodybuilder. He became our Guiding Shepherd, our Teutonic prophet of hypertrophy, the smiling Austrian messiah who descended from Mount Olympus carrying revelations about biceps, destiny, and competitive supremacy. Watching Arnold speak proudly and unapologetically about bodybuilding gave us the emotional jolt of witnessing the Second Coming, only instead of salvation through holiness, the path to transcendence involved incline presses, tuna fish, and progressive overload.

    Many of the men at the gym described seeing the film in terms usually reserved for religious conversion experiences. Before Pumping Iron, they were merely lifting weights. Afterward, they had Purpose. One afternoon I was training with a bodybuilder who embodied this transformation perfectly—a tall, deeply tanned fireman who had recently placed as a finalist in the Mr. California contest. He looked like a cross between a Marlboro advertisement and a chemically enhanced Viking philosopher. He had thick blond bushy hair, a huge mustache, black horn-rimmed glasses, and the swaggering confidence of a man who believed his lats deserved constitutional protections. Between sets he spoke about Arnold with the reverence medieval monks reserved for saints.

    The fireman loaded more than three hundred pounds onto the bench press and began repping the weight with violent authority while the gym filled with the metallic groan of bending steel and testosterone-fueled grunting. After finishing the set, he stood up slowly, breathing hard, then turned toward the mirror and flexed his chest. His pectoral muscles surged outward in thick slabs beneath his skin like fighting pit bulls trying to escape a burlap sack. The sight transfixed him. He stared at his own reflection with awe bordering on spiritual intoxication, as though Arnold himself had briefly entered his body and bestowed upon him a sacred glimpse of bodybuilding glory.

    Only fourteen years old, I wanted desperately to follow in the footsteps of the gym’s top bodybuilders. Watching them flex before the mirrors with narcotic self-admiration, I became convinced that muscle was more than tissue. Muscle was salvation. Muscle gave a man sex appeal, authority, confidence, and immunity from humiliation. The massive men roaming the gym floor did not merely appear strong; they looked complete, as if every insecurity, rejection, and private terror had been welded beneath layers of chest, shoulder, and arm development. I wanted that transformation for myself with religious intensity.

    So I devised a five-year plan.

    By nineteen, I would be huge, shredded, and competition-ready. While other boys worried about homework, driver’s licenses, and awkward conversations with girls, I was calculating protein intake, studying arm measurements, and fantasizing about posing beneath hot stage lights glazed in baby oil and triumph. In my imagination, the crowd would gasp at my physique while judges nodded gravely at the emergence of a new genetic phenomenon. I would no longer be mistaken for a dreamer, a fantasist, or some gawky suburban oddball hypnotized by muscle magazines. No. The contest stage would serve as my rite of passage, the proving ground where I would finally separate myself from pretenders and dabblers.

    That was the deeper appeal of bodybuilding: it promised brutal clarity.

    Either you possessed the discipline to transform yourself into something extraordinary or you did not.

    There would be no hiding behind charm, excuses, intellectual abstractions, or family pedigree. The body itself became evidence. Standing before the mirror at fourteen, I believed with absolute sincerity that if I could build a magnificent physique, I too would become magnificent. I was not training merely to gain muscle. I was training to manufacture an entirely new human being—one who radiated certainty instead of confusion, dominance instead of fear, and purpose instead of longing.

    Technically, I did achieve my dream in 1981 when I placed runner-up in the Mr. Teenage San Francisco bodybuilding competition. The seven years of lifting, posing, dieting, flexing, mirror worship, and protein consumption had produced tangible results. I had become one of those bronzed young men standing beneath hot stage lights while judges scrutinized my deltoids as though evaluating military architecture. But this story is not really about trophies, symmetry, or muscle definition. The physique itself, despite all the bulging spectacle, is almost beside the point. What matters is what those years inside Walt’s Gym did to me psychologically. To understand that damage properly, we must travel exactly one week before the competition.

    By then I had reduced my carbohydrates to near-starvation levels in preparation for the contest. The strategy worked. My physique looked carved from polished teakwood. Veins twisted across my arms like blue electrical wiring beneath the skin. Every muscle stood out in high-definition relief. But there was an unexpected side effect: my clothes no longer fit. At 180 pounds of deeply tanned and surgically lean teenage flesh, my pants hung off me like borrowed garments from a scarecrow. This required a new wardrobe, which led me one afternoon into the fitting room of a Pleasanton shopping mall clothing store. While I stood behind gauzy curtains trying on slacks with the solemnity of a diplomat preparing for Geneva peace talks, I overheard two attractive young women outside arguing over which one of them should ask me out. They were both beautiful. As far as I was concerned, they were welcome to form a coalition government and date me jointly. The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to speak to women. That was the tragic oversight in my years at Walt’s Gym. I had trained my biceps, triceps, chest, back, and abdominals with fanatical precision, yet somehow forgotten to develop an actual personality. I could flex my arm and cut glass with the peak of my bicep, but socially I remained underdeveloped, less human than amphibious—closer in spirit to Charlie the locker-room swamp frog than to an emotionally functioning adult male.

    Outside the fitting room, the women’s voices became louder and more competitive, as though I were a prize steer at a county fair. Their escalating excitement filled me not with confidence but with terror. I imagined them wrestling each other atop the store carpet in pursuit of the spoils while I remained frozen behind the curtain like a malfunctioning mannequin. This was supposed to be my moment of triumph. Seven years earlier I had entered Walt’s Gym believing muscle would transform me into a magnetic, self-assured Alpha Male. Instead, when confronted with actual female attention, I panicked and projected such overwhelming aloofness that it was like scattering banana peels at my own feet and watching every romantic possibility slip away in slow motion. I appeared arrogant, inaccessible, and full of myself when in reality I was merely frightened—a timid imbecile hiding inside a fortress of muscle.

    For a brief period spanning my mid-teens into my early twenties, I possessed the kind of looks that would have caused the men featured in Cosmopolitan’s “Bachelor of the Month” spreads to spiral into despair. But physically maturing and psychologically maturing are not the same process, and my emotional development lagged years behind the body I had painstakingly engineered through almost daily resistance training. The entire bodybuilding quest was supposed to culminate in sophistication: a man gliding confidently through life inside custom-tailored Italian suits while women admired his masculine authority. Instead, after years spent among men trapped in varying stages of arrested development, I emerged as a heavily muscled beefcake possessing the personality of a wilted houseplant. I had constructed the body of a Greek god only to inhabit it like a bewildered tourist who had wandered accidentally onto Mount Olympus. 

    My exterior was complete—bronzed, intimidating, and sculpted to near absurdity—but the interior remained unfinished, a psychological construction site littered with emotional scaffolding and giant WORK IN PROGRESS signs flapping in the wind.

  • Dreaming of Barbara Eden 

    Dreaming of Barbara Eden 

    As a child of the 1960s, I possessed a vivid understanding of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race, thanks less to geopolitics than to my devoted viewing of The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show. The cartoon’s Russian-accented villains, Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, were forever skulking around America attempting to steal military secrets, sabotage technology, or siphon jet fuel under orders from their unseen despot, Fearless Leader. Serving the fictional nation of Pottsylvania—a barely disguised Soviet Union with worse lighting and thicker accents—they represented the eternal communist menace lurking just beyond the free world’s picket fence. Even as a little kid, I understood the basic message: America and Russia were locked in a planetary knife fight for domination, and everybody was expected to pick a side.

    Television in those days functioned as a kind of patriotic catechism. Cartoon after cartoon, drama after drama, taught me who stood atop the hierarchy of masculine excellence. The Goalkeepers of Dominance were not poets, philosophers, or accountants. They were military men. Fighter pilots. Astronauts. Decorated officers with square jaws, crew cuts, and enough technical competence to vaporize enemy nations before breakfast.

    One such exemplar was Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie. Major Nelson was an astronaut, Air Force officer, scientist, and possessor of the sort of clean-cut competence television regarded as irresistible to women and essential to national survival. Naturally, fate rewarded him accordingly. Stranded on a beach after a space mission, he discovered Jeannie, played by my first great childhood crush, Barbara Eden, a blonde goddess in a pink harem costume who emerged from a bottle prepared to devote herself entirely to his happiness.

    This did not strike me as unrealistic.

    Television had already instructed me that men possessing advanced military rank and scientific aptitude were the Alphas of civilization. These men piloted rockets, commanded bases, protected democracy, and consequently received the lion’s share of earthly rewards: prestige, adventure, beautiful women, and thunderously triumphant theme music swelling behind them as they strode across the screen. Major Anthony Nelson from I Dream of Jeannie discovering Jeannie, played by Barbara Eden, never struck me as fantasy. It seemed more like proper cosmic compensation for loyal service to the American empire. Risk your life for freedom, master aerospace technology, and eventually a gorgeous blonde genie materializes on a beach devoted entirely to your happiness. Such was the moral arithmetic of 1960s television.

    But television was not my only instructor in Alpha Behavior.

    My father taught the course at home.

    Every day I was reminded of his military pedigree when I quietly entered my parents’ bedroom and stared at the framed Army photograph resting on the dresser beside my mother’s jewelry box with its perfumes, rings, tangled necklaces, and atomized clouds of Evening in Paris glamour. Nearby sat my father’s modest silver Timex watch ticking softly through the years like the heartbeat of working-class American masculinity itself. Together these objects formed a strange domestic altar: beauty, time, marriage, discipline, and the fading aura of Cold War heroism.

    The photograph dominated everything around it.

    In the picture, my father, a young Army gunner in the late 1950s, stood in immaculate military dress uniform with the rigid bearing of a man who believed discipline, patriotism, and artillery fire could keep civilization from collapsing into barbarism. The dark uniform bestowed upon him an almost mythological authority beneath the soft bedroom light. His military cap rested perfectly above a face so sharply cut it looked sculpted from granite by a Pentagon propagandist commissioned to manufacture the ideal American warrior for recruitment posters. His bold eyebrows and dark eyes did not merely face the camera—they radiated fearless confidence, the kind possessed by men who believed they could march directly into gunfire and emerge untouched by history. He held his rifle across his chest with solemn authority, as if permanently prepared to defend his honor, his country, or perhaps simply his parking space.

    Like Major Nelson, my father belonged to that sacred fraternity of Gatekeepers of Dominance whose lives seemed full of lessons about toughness, competition, hierarchy, and victory.

    In fact, without my father’s ruthless competitive instincts, I might never have existed at all.

    During his Army years in Anchorage, Alaska, my father became embroiled in a romantic rivalry with another soldier named John Shalikashvili, who would later rise to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the time, however, both men were merely ambitious young servicemen competing for the affection of my teenage mother after meeting her in a tavern.

    The future fate of American military leadership—and my own biological existence—apparently hinged upon who possessed superior courtship logistics.

    The rivalry paused briefly over Christmas when Shalikashvili returned home to Peoria, Illinois, while my father flew to Hollywood, Florida, to visit family. But my father, sensing opportunity the way a battlefield commander senses enemy weakness, decided to return to Anchorage several days early in order to reclaim tactical advantage.

    There was only one problem.

    His cream-colored 1959 Morris Minor sedan was malfunctioning.

    The Lucas fuel filter had failed, and the local auto parts store still lacked a replacement. Lesser men might have surrendered to mechanical fate. My father instead improvised.

    Using his only prophylactic and a paperclip, he engineered a makeshift repair to keep the fuel pump from sticking open or closed. It was less an automobile repair than a strange act of battlefield ingenuity, the sort of thing that sounds too absurd to be true but somehow becomes more believable precisely because it involves Army men in Alaska during the Cold War.

    The improvised contraption worked well enough to get him to Seattle, where he boarded the ferry to Alaska and arrived back in Anchorage forty-eight hours ahead of his rival.

    Forty-eight hours.

    That was the margin separating General Shalikashvili’s alternate future from mine.

    Nine months later, on October 28, 1961, I was born.

    After observing future John Shalikashvili lose the reproductive arms race to my father, I received my second brutal lesson in competitive dominance at the age of five.

    By then I had constructed my first bachelor pad: a crude treehouse on the grounds of the Flavet Villages Apartments in Gainesville, Florida. Calling it a “treehouse” may be generous. It was essentially several weathered planks nailed into a tree by boys who possessed neither engineering skills nor concern for mortality. But to me it was magnificent—a penthouse suite suspended above civilization itself.

    One afternoon I attempted to lure Tammy Leidecker into my airborne kingdom using what I believed to be irresistible bait: a small red box of Sun-Maid raisins.

    I flashed the box proudly at the bottom of the tree. The package itself radiated authority. The Sun-Maid girl held an enormous tray of grapes while glowing inside a halo of yellow light and white triangles like some Protestant saint canonized by the California Raisin Board. She wore a red bonnet and smiled with wholesome confidence, as if assuring the public that dried fruit represented the pinnacle of human pleasure.

    “Come up here!” I shouted to Tammy.

    And miracle of miracles—she began climbing.

    Slowly she ascended the wooden slats toward my treehouse while I basked in premature romantic triumph.

    Then disaster struck.

    From a neighboring tree emerged my rival, Zane Johnson, jutting his head through a cluster of leaves like a jungle insurgent launching psychological warfare.

    “I’ve got something WAY better than raisins!” he shouted.

    Then he revealed them.

    Captain Kangaroo Cookies.

    Not ordinary cookies.
    Cream-filled sandwich cookies.

    Double-fudge artillery.

    Zane held the package aloft with the swagger of a used-car salesman unveiling a fully loaded Cadillac. The moment I saw those cookies, my heart collapsed into my stomach.

    I instantly understood how Mick Jagger must have felt in 1964 while standing backstage watching James Brown perform his legendary cape routine. Brown would stagger theatrically, collapse from exhaustion, then resurrect himself in a frenzy of sweat and transcendence while the audience lost its collective mind. Those close to Jagger later said he looked shattered watching the performance because he knew no mortal human should attempt to follow it.

    That was exactly how I felt staring at Zane Johnson’s cookies while clutching my pathetic little raisins like a bankrupt peasant holding expired currency.

    I already knew the outcome before it happened.

    Tammy froze halfway up my tree.

    She turned slowly toward Zane’s cookies with the greedy reverence prospectors reserve for gold bullion. Then she looked back at my raisins and gave them a tiny sneer of contempt so devastating it could have been delivered by a Parisian food critic.

    Moments later she descended my tree, sprinted toward Zane’s fortress, and climbed his wooden slats with astonishing athleticism.

    Traitor.

    Soon the two of them sat together inside his treehouse devouring cream-filled chocolate sandwiches while I remained alone in my pathetic dried-fruit kingdom like an overthrown monarch of nutritional austerity.

    When they finished eating, they licked the frosting from their lips and openly gloated at me.

    I had lost.

    Not merely the girl.
    The entire competition.

    As I watched them nestle together in sugar-fueled intimacy, I reclined inside my abandoned treehouse and cried myself to sleep. I imagine it resembled the way Mick Jagger privately wept after witnessing James Brown annihilate the laws of stage performance.

    Several hours later I awoke screaming.

    Red fire ants had swarmed the treehouse.

    Presumably attracted by the raisins, the tiny sadists covered my body from head to toe. The pain was biblical. It felt as though every inch of my flesh had been flogged with electrified stinging nettles.

    I tore down the tree and sprinted back to our apartment shrieking while my mother threw me into a scalding bath to drown the ants.

    As I sat there nursing my swollen welts, I interpreted the entire ordeal with the melodramatic seriousness available only to children and future writers.

    The lesson was obvious.

    In the evolutionary arms race between Sun-Maid Raisins and Captain Kangaroo Cookies, the cookies had won.

    That day the connection between alpha status, superior bait, and reproductive success burned itself permanently into my lizard brain.

    I never entered the treehouse again.

    It remained abandoned afterward, slowly decaying among the branches with only a few relics left behind to testify that someone had once inhabited it: plastic army men, toy cars, gum wrappers, fragments of failed boyhood ambition.

    After the red-ant catastrophe, I retreated increasingly indoors and became obsessed with I Dream of Jeannie.

    Obsessed may actually be too mild a word.

    I knew every episode by heart. I could anticipate each joke, each misunderstanding, each twitch of Jeannie’s magical powers. None of this diminished my devotion. I was hopelessly enthralled by Jeannie herself, played by Barbara Eden.

    Eventually she began visiting me in dreams.

    Whenever she appeared, beautiful aching music accompanied her presence. She would float through my bedroom window, take my hand, and carry me around the world to exotic destinations glowing beneath moonlight. When I awoke, I could still smell her lingering in the room—honey, sweat, nectar, patchouli—the impossible perfume of longing itself.

    The dreams continued throughout my childhood.

    Then one day I encountered two beautiful sisters, and after that encounter Jeannie stopped visiting me in my dreams forever.

    This story is about those sisters.

    It happened during the spring of 1973 on a warm California afternoon after sixth grade classes had ended. The school bus dropped us off near Crow Canyon Road, and several of us wandered across the street to the local 7-Eleven to buy Slurpees before making the miserable uphill trek home along Greenridge Road.

    Inside the store, the radio was playing “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl),” that melancholy yacht-rock masterpiece about romantic disappointment disguised as cheerful singalong music. The frozen-drink machines hummed. The air smelled of sugar syrup, cardboard pizza, and asphalt baking in the afternoon heat.

    That was when the Horsefault sisters entered.

    They were impossible not to notice.

    One was in eighth grade, the other already a sophomore in high school. Both had long blonde hair, freckles, high cheekbones, and mischievous blue eyes that radiated the dangerous energy of girls who enjoyed creating problems merely to see what would happen next. To my sixth-grade brain, they resembled slightly feral versions of Barbara Eden.

    One of them smiled at me and asked:

    “Do you want to see our rabbit?”

    Now, to be clear, I had absolutely no interest in rabbits.

    Had two pimply boys invited me to inspect a caged rodent behind a farmhouse, I would have fled instantly while clutching my cherry Slurpee in terror. But these were beautiful older girls, and beautiful older girls possess the supernatural ability to make adolescent boys enthusiastically volunteer for situations that would otherwise trigger police investigations.

    “Yes,” I said immediately. “I’d love to see the rabbit.”

    Naturally.

    So I followed them.

    We left the 7-Eleven parking lot and walked perhaps a hundred yards down a dusty trail lined with dry horse manure and tall grass swaying in the afternoon breeze. Beyond the field stood their weathered farmhouse, half hidden behind eucalyptus trees and fencing. The place had the unsettling atmosphere of a rural fairy tale where attractive maidens lure travelers into barns never to be heard from again.

    Behind a thicket of bushes stood the rabbit cage.

    It was large enough to imprison a medium-sized farm animal—or an unsuspecting sixth grader. The cage door hung slightly open, and a heavy chain lock dangled ominously from the latch.

    I peered inside.

    No rabbit.

    At that exact moment the sisters burst into shrieking laughter and lunged at me.

    They grabbed my arms and tried to shove me into the cage.

    The truth arrived instantly and with horrifying clarity: there had never been a rabbit. The rabbit was merely bait. I had walked directly into an ambush orchestrated by two hormonally deranged Valkyries whose apparent goal was to lock me inside a cage and transform me into some sort of suburban hostage.

    But they had underestimated me.

    At eleven years old I was already deep into my future bodybuilding destiny and absurdly strong for my age. What followed was less an abduction than a full-contact barnyard wrestling match. We grappled outside the cage rolling through dry grass, hay, and dirt while clouds of dust exploded around us like scenes from a low-budget western.

    Nearby chickens erupted into chaos.

    Inside the coop they flapped wildly, clucked hysterically, and hurled themselves about with the alarm of creatures witnessing either a murder or a satanic fertility ritual.

    The sisters were laughing so hard they could barely breathe. Sweat darkened their halter tops and cutoffs as they struggled unsuccessfully to overpower me. Eventually, exhausted and defeated, they abandoned the mission.

    The moment their grip weakened, I escaped.

    I sprinted home outraged.

    Not merely embarrassed—outraged.

    They had attempted to steal my freedom.

    I stormed into the living room and did what I always did when emotionally overwhelmed by the complexities of existence: I turned on I Dream of Jeannie.

    That night Jeannie came to me one final time.

    As always, she floated silently through my bedroom window accompanied by that beautiful aching music that seemed to emerge from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously.

    But this time something was different.

    She looked sad.

    “The Horsefault sisters want you now,” she explained softly. “It’s time for you to return their affections. They are real girls. Girls who do not drift through bedroom windows inside moonlit clouds.”

    I argued desperately.

    I told her I loved her.

    But she only smiled with melancholy tenderness before slowly retreating backward into a gray mist that swallowed her completely.

    Then she vanished forever.

    After that night, the dreams changed.

    No more Jeannie.

    No more moonlit flights across the world.

    Instead my dreams became feverish and earthly. They featured rabbit cages beneath silver moonlight, hayfields trembling in the wind, and sweat-soaked girls in cutoffs and halter tops chasing me through cornfields while laughing hysterically.

    “Come out, come out, wherever you are!” they cried.

    Over and over.

    And just like that, childhood fantasy gave way to adolescent bewilderment.

    I never watched I Dream of Jeannie again.