Cinemorphosis

Category: culture

  • Beauty Without Performance: The Quiet Legacy of The Sundays

    Beauty Without Performance: The Quiet Legacy of The Sundays

    Harriet Wheeler and David Gavurin of The Sundays gave the world my favorite song of all time: “You’re Not the Only One I Know.”
    I didn’t just fall for that song — I tumbled headfirst into their entire body of work across three albums, each one a quiet masterclass in melancholy and grace. I saw them live twice, but the 1990 show at Slim’s in San Francisco left a scar on my heart that never quite healed. Somewhere between the ringing guitars and Harriet’s bittersweet voice, I understood something about beauty that hurt — the way only true beauty can.
    I bought a Sundays T-shirt that night, and decades later, my teenage daughter wears it like a badge of honor as if carrying the torch for a band she never saw but somehow still feels.

    Wheeler and Gavurin, true to form, refused to play the roles we demanded of them.
    After making their brief, brilliant splash on the music scene, they disappeared — not in disgrace, but in quiet triumph.
    No messy social media fade-outs. No tragic reunion tours at casino amphitheaters. Just two people choosing domestic obscurity over the ceaseless meat grinder of public performance.
    Rumor has it Harriet became a schoolteacher. I hope that’s true. There’s something magnificent about the idea of her trading in the spotlight for a chalkboard, living in the kind of real, unperformed life that fame devours.

    Meanwhile, their fanbase — myself included — obsessed for years, combing through blogs and Reddit threads for any sign of a comeback that never arrived.
    But the more I think about it, the more I admire Wheeler and Gavurin’s refusal to extend the brand of themselves indefinitely.
    The same beauty that made their music shimmer with timeless sadness likely steered them away from the terminal exhibitionism that seems to consume so many artists.
    Their art wasn’t a ladder to fame — it was a lifeboat out of it.

    They should know this much:
    The same Sunday’s T-shirt I once wore to death now lives on, worn proudly by my daughter, proof that real magic — the kind you don’t sell, the kind you don’t explain — doesn’t need an encore.

  • Obscurity Without Shame: The Enduring Beauty of the Trash Can Sinatras’ “Obscurity Knocks”

    Obscurity Without Shame: The Enduring Beauty of the Trash Can Sinatras’ “Obscurity Knocks”

    It was 1990, and there I was — strutting down Hollywood Boulevard with my girlfriend, a walking cliché in a secondhand leather jacket, pretending to be too jaded for the tourists but secretly hoping to be discovered by a roving talent scout. We ducked into some grim little shrine to adolescent misery, shopping for Smiths T-shirts and anything else that might broadcast our manufactured melancholy.

    That’s when the store’s sound system offered up “Obscurity Knocks” by the Trash Can Sinatras — a song I was too full of myself to recognize as a direct warning shot.
    At the time, I was a preening, would-be screenwriter and novelist, drunk on my own imaginary press clippings, convinced that obscurity was a fate reserved for lesser mortals. I didn’t realize that the bright, bittersweet melody washing over those racks of ironic despair was, in fact, my personal horoscope: You, sir, will toil unseen. You will remain a hidden draft in life’s file cabinet. And — shocking plot twist — it will not kill you.

    Decades later, “Obscurity Knocks” still sits at the top of my all-time favorites list, not because it flatters ambition, but because it gently demolishes it.
    It’s a hymn to living for the work itself, to making peace with invisibility, to resisting the cheap, sugary high of external validation.

    It is one of those rare songs that manages to be both wistful and liberating at once — a graceful acceptance letter to a life lived outside the gravitational pull of fame. Far from being a bitter anthem of failure, it’s a clear-eyed celebration of choosing the harder, more honest road: living for one’s art rather than living off it.

    At first listen, the jangly guitars and breezy melody almost betray the lyrical gravity beneath. The music is light, but the words carry the weight of a reckoning. The narrator stands at the border between youthful ambition and mature resignation, surveying the life he has actually lived versus the life he once imagined. And yet, there is no rage, no tantrum, no grasping for lost relevance. Instead, there is something far healthier and more beautiful: an elegy without self-pity, a conscious decision to stay faithful to the things that matter.

    The song’s real bravery lies in its refusal to dress obscurity up as defeat. It suggests that real integrity means loving what you do even when the spotlight points elsewhere — when the record deals dry up, when the critics stop caring, when the audience forgets. In an era addicted to metrics — clicks, likes, views — “Obscurity Knocks” remains a defiant refusal to reduce one’s life to a scoreboard.

    Mortality hums quietly underneath the entire track. It’s not explicit, but it’s there, felt in the weariness behind certain lines, the subtle wear and tear of a life measured not by trophies but by quieter, richer achievements: loyalty to craft, private joy, the bittersweet pleasure of simply carrying on. It accepts the inevitable fading without collapsing into nihilism.

    There is longing, yes — the song aches with it — but it’s a clean, unsentimental kind of longing. It isn’t the longing for public adoration or manufactured relevance; it’s the deeper human longing to matter, to create something true before the clock runs out. In this way, “Obscurity Knocks” isn’t just about a music career. It’s about the universal experience of learning to live meaningfully in a world that will not give you a standing ovation for it.

    The Trash Can Sinatras don’t rage against the dying of the light; they tip their hats to it, shrug, and keep playing. And in that shrug, that beautifully unvarnished acceptance, they find a kind of glory that fame could never offer.

    Do the Trash Can Sinatras have a song more beautiful than “Obscurity Knocks”? Technically, yes — but only one, and finding it is like trying to locate the Holy Grail in a used CD bin. It’s a B-side called “My Mistake,” a painfully perfect little anthem about a young fool so drunk on love he trips over his own heart like it’s a barstool in a dark room.

    It’s a song that captures, with ridiculous precision, the exquisite humiliation of thinking you’re the protagonist in a grand romance when you’re actually just a blip on someone else’s radar — a mistake you won’t stop making until life has finished sanding the delusions off your bones.

    Postscript:

    After writing this post, I felt compelled to listen to “Obscurity Knocks” on YouTube and someone asked in the comment section: “Any other songs like this?” I answered: “Yes, ‘My Finest Hour’ by The Sundays.”

  • New Yorker’s Remorse Syndrome

    New Yorker’s Remorse Syndrome

    It’s a charming form of cosplay, really — striding around as a “well-informed citizen” while sinking ungodly hours into consumer research. Watches, radios, headphones, laptops, Chromebooks, mechanical keyboards, high-end sweatshirts, orthopedic luxury sneakers, protein powders, protein bars, athletic-grade water bottles — an entire temple of optimized living, curated with clerical devotion.

    Meanwhile, out in the real world, society is fraying like an ancient flag in a hurricane. Yeats’ prophecy is no longer a chilling warning — it’s a project status update.
    The center isn’t holding. The center left the chat months ago.
    But instead of reckoning with the slow dissolve of civil society, it’s so much easier, so much kinder to the blood pressure, to compare toaster ovens with touchless air fryer settings.

    Yes, yes, I know — one must be informed. George Carlin gave us front-row tickets to the Freak Show. We owe it to the species, or at least to our own dim dignity, to bear witness.
    But honestly? Some days, it feels like sanity demands partial withdrawal. A news podcast here. A curated briefing there. Enough to feign civic engagement at parties without having to call a therapist immediately afterward.

    This brings me to the shrine of guilt at the center of my living room: the great, unread New Yorker stack.
    I have subscribed since 1985, back when Reagan was doing his best kingly impression and nobody had heard of an iPhone.
    The stack now functions less as reading material and more as a kind of grim altar — a silent accusation in glossy print.
    Friends glance at it and nod approvingly, as if my very possession of these magazines implies moral seriousness.
    I let them believe.
    Inside, I know better.
    I know that I am a fallen monk, a heretic of intellectual duty, choosing the velvet lure of consumer escapism over the weighty gospels of sociopolitical collapse.

    I have a diagnosis: New Yorker’s Remorse Syndrome — a condition in which one publicly performs allegiance to Enlightenment values while privately seeking refuge among comparison charts and Amazon star ratings.
    The mind knows what it ought to do.
    The heart, however, prefers shopping for the perfect water bottle while Rome burns quietly in the background.

  • Writing a Blog in the Performative Hangover Era

    Writing a Blog in the Performative Hangover Era

    For over a decade, I ran a YouTube channel — a modest operation born in my late forties. Calling it a channel might be too grand: there were no edits, no soundtracks, no backgrounds, no clever image inserts. Just me, my watches, and a stubborn refusal to pretend I knew anything about video production. It was, in essence, a podcast that forgot it was supposed to be seen.

    I built a small but loyal audience — over 10,000 subscribers, steady commenters, familiar names. Within the narrow but fervent watch community, I was a known entity: a man chronicling the eternal scuffle with watch addiction.

    But now, staring down my sixty-fourth birthday this October, I’m stepping away — and not with a heavy heart, but with something closer to relief.

    First, I have no desire to become an influencer. The idea of monetizing my channel, hawking brands I barely tolerate, feels as alien as joining a boy band at my age. Second, I have zero interest in learning the sacred arts of Final Cut Pro wizardry. The polished, professional YouTuber life was never my ambition. Third — and most importantly — the fire that once drove me is gone. And good riddance. Fire, in my case, has always been another word for addiction — the old need for validation, the parasocial buzz of comment sections and endless watch chatter. I don’t want the fire back. I want peace.

    Does this retreat from YouTube mean a pivot to podcasting?
    No.
    I’m not looking for a new mirror in which to admire or define myself. I don’t need the hustle of relevance, or the 3 a.m. panic about subscriber counts. A podcast requires not just a theme but conviction — a genuine need to say something the world hasn’t already heard. Right now, my life is full of smaller, quieter things: amateur piano practice, kettlebell workouts in my garage, a general interest in health and fitness. None of these scream “launch a weekly show.”

    Sure, I could bang out a fitness video for people over fifty — it would take thirty seconds: Stay active, love people, eat real food, prioritize protein, lay off the booze. There, fitness empire built.
    But combing through the absurdly granular debates of the diet-industrial complex? No thanks.

    Truthfully, most social media feels unbearable to me now — bloated with performative sincerity, vibrating with empty gestures. I’m done performing. Like many, I have full-blown social media fatigue.

    And then there’s the nagging ghost of my old literary ambitions — the dream of publishing memoir, fiction, or some slippery hybrid of the two, the sort of “autofiction” the novelist Emmanuel Carrère perfected. That ghost finds me now, not on YouTube, not on a podcast, but on my blog.

    The blog is where I now quietly reign.
    Not as a digital emperor counting clicks, but as a stubborn craftsman hacking away at the weeds of complacency. I don’t know if my writing will “take off” or “storm the world.” I only know it helps me process the madness, fight entropy, and stay alert to the real battle — the one against mindless consumerism and numbing repetition.

    So here I am, in what I suppose I could call the next chapter.
    The Performative Hangover Years.
    The Post-COVID Malaise.
    The Be Brave in Your Sixties Project.

    I’ll get back to you with the final title once I’ve lived it a little longer.

  • Velvet Fists: Sentimentality, Violence, and the Lie of the Crappy Love Song

    Velvet Fists: Sentimentality, Violence, and the Lie of the Crappy Love Song

    In the early ’90s, screenwriter Dennis Potter—whose haunting 1980 film Blade on a Feather once grabbed my imagination by the throat—sat across from Charlie Rose, passionately defending one of humanity’s most derided cultural artifacts: the “crappy love song.”

    Potter’s argument was simple and oddly noble:
    In a world where we grovel like pigs at the trough of materialism, even the cheesiest love ballad points, however clumsily, toward something higher—a yearning for transformative love, the kind that rattles the soul and redeems our miserable existence.
    And that, Potter insisted, should be celebrated, not sneered at.

    I see his point.
    But I can’t quite choke it down.

    What happens when the music is even crasser than life itself?
    Forgive the offense, but Kenny G springs to mind—a man whose saxophone emits what can only be described as the ambient soundtrack of lobotomized love.
    Millions swoon to his treacly squeals, convinced they’re tasting transcendence.
    But what they’re really swallowing is sentimentality in its most lethal form: syrupy, infantilizing, and vaguely unhinged.

    While I love Potter for wanting to defend the human need for transcendent emotion, I can’t ignore the underlying rot.
    These “crappy love songs,” much like Kenny G’s ambient anesthesia, often peddle not real love, but an emotionally stunted counterfeit—sentimentality, a soft mask stretched tight over something far uglier.

    Sentimentality terrifies me because it is not benign.
    It is childish emotion weaponized.
    It is the refusal to mature, to engage with the complicated ambiguities of real love, real pain, real life.
    And because these stunted feelings are defended with the ferocity of a cornered child, sentimentality often harbors its dark twin: violence.

    Saul Bellow, with his characteristic unsparing clarity in Herzog, nailed it:
    It’s the most sentimental people who are the most violent.

    Why?
    Because sentimentality is a velvet carpet stretched precariously over a tiger’s claw.
    It’s the illusion of sweetness clinging desperately to a subterranean rage—the rage of people who cannot tolerate having their fragile, maudlin dreams challenged.
    To question sentimentality is to trigger a defensive violence, a panicked fury at the idea that real adulthood demands something sterner, braver, and infinitely less sweet.

    So no, Dennis Potter, I can’t fully join you in your defense of the crappy love song.
    Because too often, beneath that soaring key change and saccharine lyric, I hear not the longing for transcendent love—
    but the faint, snarling growl of a soul that refuses to grow up.

  • The Protein Bar Delusion: My Love Affair with Lies and Graham Crackers

    The Protein Bar Delusion: My Love Affair with Lies and Graham Crackers

    I don’t eat protein bars anymore. Not because I’m virtuous—far from it—but because I finally admitted the obvious: they’re not meal replacements. They’re meal add-ons, sneaky little calorie grenades dressed up in the halo of anabolic health, whispering sweet promises of lean muscle and zero guilt.

    I’ve been chasing that lie since the 1970s.
    Back then, the gold standard of protein bars was the Bob Hoffman Club Sandwich—a peanut butter and graham cracker Frankenstein’s monster that must have clocked in at 500 calories, easy. It wasn’t a snack. It wasn’t a supplement. It was a religious experience.
    If I wanted to recreate it today, I’d just mash a couple of Reese’s between two graham crackers and pray for forgiveness.

    Over the decades, I kept eating protein bars—dense peanut butter bricks, chewy “engineered food” monstrosities—but never to any good effect. These bars didn’t sculpt my physique. They bulked me up like a slow, steady inflation of regret. Eventually, I abandoned them, like a gambler walking away from the slot machine after realizing the house always wins.

    Still, they haunt me.
    Protein bars remind me of Willy Wonka’s cursed 7-course meal gum that turned Violet Beauregarde into a giant blueberry: a miracle product promising the world but delivering only bloat and existential crisis.

    To be fair, the bars have gotten better over the years. There’s even one called David (because apparently even protein bars have minimalist branding now) made with real food, boasting 28 grams of protein at a miraculous 150 calories. It tempts me.
    Wouldn’t it be smarter, simpler, even a bit sexier to chomp down a David bar at breakfast instead of mixing up my daily slurry of yogurt, protein powder, soy milk, and berries? (A concoction that hits 500 calories with depressing reliability.)

    Maybe. But I know myself: I’d be starving by 9:30 a.m., staring into the abyss of a second breakfast. Protein bars have never given me satiety. They’re a snack in drag—a dessert cosplaying as health food.

    And yet… with all the shredded influencers on YouTube slicing open protein bars like they’re sommelier-testing vintage wine, I feel the pull. A little FOMO. A little “Maybe this time it’ll be different.”

    I have to remind myself, again and again:
    I’m not in love with the protein bar.
     I’m in love with the idea of the protein bar—the fantasy that some sweet, tidy, macro-balanced rectangle will solve my problems, sculpt my body, and carry me into some higher, cleaner version of myself.

    Reality tastes different.
    It tastes like mealy, sweet resignation. It tastes like being duped—with a thin layer of whey isolate on top.

  • Remembering the 90s when Seinfeld made existential apathy a form of cultural resistance

    Remembering the 90s when Seinfeld made existential apathy a form of cultural resistance

    I’ve always been a lousy sleeper—a lifelong insomniac, night-thinker, ceiling-staring obsessive. So when my brain, usually a humming engine of late-night anxieties, surprises me by downshifting into a silky semi-sleep, I take notice. I don’t just enjoy those moments—I archive them in some velvet-lined folder in my mind, filed between “Miracles” and “Rare Weather Patterns.”

    One such miracle happened in the summer of 1991 in the gloriously tacky suburb of Buena Park, California. I had recently relocated from the Bay Area to Bakersfield, that Central Valley of hot wind and dust, to teach composition at the university. It was a job that paid me in respect and barely enough money to keep me in burritos and gas.

    Weekends were spent visiting Nicole, the girlfriend of my ex-student Mike, a real-deal Navy SEAL with shoulders like boulders and a heart that thumped exclusively for her. We’d drive south, Mike and I, and wind up at Nicole’s parents’ place not far from Knott’s Berry Farm—California’s budget Disneyland, where roller coasters and churros come with a faint scent of desperation.

    Dinner with Nicole’s folks was always home-cooked, polite, and meatloaf-heavy. But the real magic happened later in the den, where the three of us would settle in for prime-time America’s Funniest Home Videos, back when Bob Saget’s voiceovers made even mild concussions look charming.

    Mike and Nicole snuggled on the sofa, whispering sweet nothings or planning some SEAL Team Six domestic mission. I would sink into a bloated yellow bean bag chair like a man slipping into a warm pond of polyester and forgotten dreams.

    As I floated somewhere between reruns and REM, Nicole’s mom would be doing laundry in the adjacent room, and the floral scent of freshly tumbled linens—fabric softener with notes of lilac and vague suburban joy—would drift in and intoxicate me. The TV flickered. The lovers whispered. I, utterly ignored, entered a state of transcendence usually reserved for monks or the chemically enhanced.

    In that half-dream, I’d rocket through constellations, revisit my childhood neighborhood where everyone still had knees that worked, and rendezvous with a mysterious dream woman who always met me at sunset on a Hawaiian beach. I was twenty-nine, single, unburdened, and lazy in a way only the early ‘90s allowed—when Seinfeld made existential apathy a form of cultural resistance.

    Looking back now, from the sagging perch of sixty-three, it’s easy to sigh at the sheer, stupid comfort of it all. I no longer live in that bubble-wrapped world where being a third wheel was a blissful kind of freedom, where responsibility was just a concept in other people’s lives.

    Still, on a quiet afternoon, stretched out on my modern couch, if the narrator of a nature documentary starts detailing the mating habits of sea otters in a sonorous British whisper, something in me softens. The air thickens. I begin to drift. And for a flickering moment, I’m back in that bean bag—yellow, ridiculous, sublime—floating on the fabric-softened breeze of a world that no longer exists.

  • Streamberry, Self-Loathing, and the Algorithmic Abyss: How “Joan Is Awful” Skewers the Curated Life

    Streamberry, Self-Loathing, and the Algorithmic Abyss: How “Joan Is Awful” Skewers the Curated Life

    In Black Mirror’s “Joan Is Awful,” Charlie Brooker offers more than a dystopian farce—he serves up a wickedly accurate satire of the curated lives we present online. It’s not just Joan who’s awful. It’s us. All of us who’ve filtered our flaws, outsourced our personalities to engagement metrics, and whittled ourselves down to algorithm-friendly avatars. The episode doesn’t critique Joan alone—it roasts the whole rotten architecture of social media curation and shows, with brutal clarity, how the pursuit of digital perfection transforms us into insufferable parodies of our former selves.

    First, let’s talk about performance. Joan, like any good social media user, lives her life as if auditioning for a role she already occupies—one shaped not by authenticity but by optics. She performs “relatable misery,” complete with awkward office banter, fake smiles, and passive-aggressive salad orders. Social media rewards this pantomime, demanding we be palatable, aspirational, and vaguely miserable all at once. The result? A version of ourselves designed to please an audience we secretly resent. Joan is what happens when your curated self becomes the dominant narrative—when branding overtakes being. Her AI-generated counterpart doesn’t misrepresent her; it distills her curated contradictions into a grotesque caricature that somehow feels… accurate.

    Second, there’s the fact that Joan—like all of us—is under constant surveillance. In Joan Is Awful, it’s not just the NSA snooping in the background—it’s the entire viewing public, binge-watching her daily descent into algorithm-approved degradation. This is what we’ve signed up for with every “I accept” click: to become content, voluntarily and irrevocably. Our data, behaviors, and digital crumbs are fed into the algorithmic sausage grinder, and what comes out is a grotesque mirror held to our worst instincts. The AI Joan is not a stranger; she’s the monster we’ve been molding through every performative tweet, selfie, and humblebrag. In a world where perception is currency, she’s our highest-valued coin.

    Then comes the psychological shrapnel: identity fragmentation. Joan can no longer tell where she ends and Streamberry’s Joan begins, just as many of us can’t quite remember who we were before the algorithm gave us feedback loops in the form of likes, retweets, and dopamine pings. This curated self isn’t just a mask—it becomes the default setting. The dissonance between public persona and private truth breeds an existential malaise. Joan’s real tragedy isn’t that her life is on TV—it’s that she’s lost the plot. She’s a passenger in her own narrative, outsourced to a system that rewards spectacle over substance.

    Let’s not forget the moral rot. Watching your AI double destroy your reputation while millions tune in might seem horrifying—until you remember we do this willingly. We doomscroll, rubberneck scandals, and serve our digital idols on platters made of hashtags. Joan, sitting slack-jawed in front of her TV, is no different from us—addicted to her own collapse. It’s not the horror of exposure that eats her alive; it’s the realization that her own worst self is exactly what the algorithm wanted. And that’s what it rewarded.

    Ultimately, Joan Is Awful is a break-up letter with social media—if your ex were a manipulative narcissist with access to all your personal data and a flair for psychological torture. Escaping the curated self, as Joan tries to do, is like fleeing an abusive relationship. You know it’s toxic, you know it’s killing you—but part of you still misses the attention. The episode doesn’t end with a triumphant reinvention; it ends with Joan in fast food purgatory, finally unplugged but still wrecked. Because once you’ve sold your soul to the algorithm, the buyback price is steep.

    So yes, Joan is awful. But only because she reflects what happens when we let the curated life take the wheel. In the Streamberry age, we aren’t living—we’re streaming ourselves into oblivion. And the worst part? We’re giving it five stars.

  • The Gospel According to Mounjaro and ChatGPT

    The Gospel According to Mounjaro and ChatGPT

    The other day I was listening to Howard Stern and his co-host Robin Quivers talking about how a bunch of celebrities magically slimmed down at the same time. The culprit, they noted, was Ozempic—a drug available mostly to the rich. While they laughed about the side effects, such as incontinence, “Ozempic face” and “Ozempic butt,” I couldn’t help but see these grotesque symptoms as a metaphor for the Ozempification of a society hooked on shortcuts. They enjoyed some short-term benefits but the side effects were far worse than the supposed solution. Ozempification was strikingly evident in AI-generated essays–boring, generic, surface-level, cliche-ridden, just about worthless. Regardless of how well structured and logically composed, these essays have the telltale signs of “Ozempfic face” and “Ozempic butt.” 

    As a college writing instructor, I’m not just trying to sell academic honesty. I’m trying to sell pride. As I face the brave new world of teaching writing in the AI era, I’ve realized that my job as a college instructor has morphed into that of a supercharged salesman. And what am I selling? No less than survival in an age where the very tools meant to empower us—like AI—threaten to bury us alive under layers of polished mediocrity. Imagine it: a spaceship has landed on Earth in the form of ChatGPT. It’s got warp-speed potential, sure, but it can either launch students into the stars of academic brilliance or plunge them into the soulless abyss of bland, AI-generated drivel. My mission? To make them realize that handling this tool without care is like inviting a black hole into their writing.

    As I fine-tune my sales pitch, I think about Ozempic–that magic slimming drug, beloved by celebrities who’ve turned from mid-sized to stick figures overnight. Like AI, Ozempic offers a seductive shortcut. But shortcuts have a price. You see the trade-off in “Ozempic face”—that gaunt, deflated look where once-thriving skin sags like a Shar-Pei’s wrinkles—or, worse still, “Ozempic butt,” where shapely glutes shrink to grim, skeletal wiring. The body wasn’t worked; it was bypassed. No muscle-building, no discipline. Just magic pill ingestion—and what do you get? A husk of your former self. Ozempified.

    The Ozempification of writing is a marvel of modern mediocrity—a literary gastric bypass where prose, instead of slimming down to something sleek and muscular, collapses into a bloated mess of clichés and stock phrases. It’s writing on autopilot, devoid of tension, rhythm, or even the faintest trace of a soul. Like the human body without effort, writing handed over to AI without scrutiny deteriorates into a skeletal, soulless product: technically coherent, yes, but lifeless as an elevator pitch for another cookie-cutter Marvel spinoff.

    What’s worse? Most people can’t spot it. They think their AI-crafted essay sparkles when, in reality, it has all the charm of Botox gone wrong—rigid, lifeless, and unnervingly “off.” Call it literary Ozempic face: a hollowed-out, sagging simulacrum of actual creativity. These essays prance about like bargain-bin Hollywood knock-offs—flashy at first glance but gutless on closer inspection.

    But here’s the twist: demonizing AI and Ozempic as shortcuts to ruin isn’t the full story. Both technologies have a darker complexity that defies simplistic moralizing. Sometimes, they’re necessary. Just as Ozempic can prevent a diabetic’s fast track to early organ failure, AI can become a valuable tool—if wielded with care and skill.

    Take Rebecca Johns’ haunting essay, “A Diet Writer’s Regrets.” It rattled me with its brutal honesty and became the cornerstone of my first Critical Thinking essay assignment. Johns doesn’t preach or wallow in platitudes. She exposes the failures of free will and good intentions in weight management with surgical precision. Her piece suggests that, as seductive as shortcuts may be, they can sometimes be life-saving, not soul-destroying. This tension—between convenience and survival, between control and surrender—deserves far more than a knee-jerk dismissal. It’s a line we walk daily in both our bodies and our writing. The key is knowing when you’re using a crutch versus when you’re just hobbling on borrowed time. 

    I want my students to grasp the uncanny parallels between Ozempic and AI writing platforms like ChatGPT. Both are cutting-edge solutions to modern problems: GLP-1 drugs for weight management and AI tools for productivity. And let’s be honest—both are becoming necessary adaptations to the absurd conditions of modern life. In a world flooded with calorie-dense junk, “willpower” and “food literacy” are about as effective as handing out umbrellas during a tsunami. For many, weight gain isn’t just an inconvenience—it’s a life-threatening hazard. Enter GLP-1s, the biochemical cavalry.

    Similarly, with AI tools quickly becoming the default infrastructure for white-collar work, resisting them might soon feel as futile as refusing to use Google Docs or Windows. If you’re in the information economy, you either adapt or get left behind. But here’s the twist I want my students to explore: both technologies, while necessary, come with strings attached. They save us from drowning, but they also bind us in ways that provoke deep, existential anguish.

    Rebecca Johns captures this anguish in her essay, “A Diet Writer’s Regrets.” Ironically, Johns started her career in diet journalism not just to inform others, but to arm herself with insider knowledge to win her own weight battles. Perhaps she could kill two birds with one stone: craft top-tier content while secretly curbing her emotional eating. But, as she admits, “None of it helped.” Instead, her career exploded along with her waistline. The magazine industry’s appetite for diet articles grew insatiable—and so did her own cravings. The stress ate away at her resolve, and before long, she was 30 pounds heavier, trapped by the very cycle she was paid to analyze.

    By the time her BMI hit 45 (deep in the obesity range), Johns was ashamed to tell anyone—even her husband. Desperate, she cycled through every diet plan she had ever recommended, only to regain the weight every time. Enter 2023. Her doctor handed her a lifeline: Mounjaro, a GLP-1 drug with a name as grand as the results it promised. (Seriously, who wouldn’t picture themselves triumphantly hiking Mount Kilimanjaro after hearing that name?) For Johns, it delivered. She shed 80 pounds without white-knuckling through hunger pangs. The miracle wasn’t just the weight loss—it was how Mounjaro rewired her mind.

    “Medical science has done what no diet-and-exercise plan ever could,” she writes. “It changed my entire relationship with what I eat and when and why.” Food no longer controlled her. But here’s the kicker: while the drug granted her a newfound sense of freedom, it also raises profound questions about dependence, control, and the shifting boundaries of human resilience—questions not unlike those we face with AI. Both Ozempic and AI can save us. But at what cost? 

    And is the cost of not using these technologies even greater? Rebecca Johns’ doctor didn’t mince words—she was teetering on the edge of diabetes. The trendy gospel of “self-love” and “body acceptance” she had once explored for her articles suddenly felt like a cruel joke. What’s the point of “self-acceptance” when carrying extra weight could put you six feet under?

    Once she started Mounjaro, everything changed. Her cravings for rich, calorie bombs disappeared, she got full on tiny portions, and all those golden nuggets of diet advice she’d dished out over the years—cut carbs, eat more protein and veggies, avoid snacks—were suddenly effortless. No more bargaining with herself for “just one cookie.” The biggest shift, however, was in her mind. She experienced a complete mental “reset.” Food no longer haunted her every waking thought. “I no longer had to white-knuckle my way through the day to lose weight,” she writes.

    Reading that, I couldn’t help but picture my students with their glowing ChatGPT tabs, no longer caffeinated zombies trying to churn out a midnight essay. With AI as their academic Mounjaro, they’ve ditched the anxiety-fueled, last-minute grind and achieved polished results with half the effort. AI cushions the process—time, energy, and creativity now outsourced to a digital assistant.

    Of course, the analogy isn’t perfect. AI tools like ChatGPT are dirt-cheap (or free), while GLP-1 drugs are expensive, scarce, and buried under a maze of insurance red tape. Johns herself is on borrowed time—her insurance will stop covering Mounjaro in just over a year. Her doctor warns that once off the drug, her weight will likely return, dragging her health risks back with it. Faced with this grim reality, she worries she’ll have no choice but to return to the endless cycle of dieting—“white-knuckling” her days with tricks and hacks that have repeatedly failed her.

    Her essay devastates me for many reasons. Johns is a smart, painfully honest narrator who lays bare the shame and anguish of relying on technology to rescue her from a problem that neither expertise nor willpower could fix. She reports on newfound freedom—freedom from food obsession, the physical benefits of shedding 80 pounds, and the relief of finally feeling like a more present, functional family member. But lurking beneath it all is the bitter truth: her well-being is tethered to technology, and that dependency is a permanent part of her identity.

    This contradiction haunts me. Technology, which I was raised to believe would stifle our potential, is now enhancing identity, granting people the ability to finally become their “better selves.” As a kid, I grew up on Captain Kangaroo, where Bob Keeshan preached the gospel of free will and positive thinking. Books like The Little Engine That Could drilled into me the sacred mantra: “I think I can.” Hard work, affirmations, and determination were supposed to be the alchemy that transformed character and gave us a true sense of self-worth.

    But Johns’ story—and millions like hers—rewrite that childhood gospel into something far darker: The Little Engine That Couldn’t. No amount of grit or optimism got her to the top of the hill. In the end, only medical science saved her from herself. And it terrifies me to think that maybe, just maybe, this is the new human condition: we can’t become our Higher Selves without technological crutches.

    This raises questions that I can’t easily shake. What does it mean to cheat if technology is now essential to survival and success? Just as GLP-1 drugs sculpt bodies society deems “acceptable,” AI is quietly reshaping creativity and productivity. At what point do we stop being individuals who achieve greatness through discipline and instead become avatars of the tech we rely on? Have we traded the dream of self-actualization for a digital illusion of competence and control?

    Of course, these philosophical quandaries feel like a luxury when most of us are drowning in the realities of modern life. Who has time to ponder free will or moral fortitude when you’re working overtime just to stay afloat? Maybe that’s the cruelest twist of all. Technology hasn’t just rewritten the rules—it’s made them inescapable. You adapt, or you get left behind. And maybe, somewhere deep down, we all already know which path we’re on.

  • The Shame of Being Crock Blocked

    The Shame of Being Crock Blocked

    I learned the invaluable lesson of staying in my lane in 1989, a year that will forever be etched in my memory as the year I brought industrial sludge to an English Department potluck picnic. I was a freshly minted lecturer at a university in the California desert, and it was my inaugural potluck. Naturally, I was determined to impress my colleagues with a culinary masterpiece. I had a slow cooker, a gift from my mother, which I imagined to be my ticket to gastronomic glory. So, I decided to tackle curried lentils—a dish so ambitious it could have been named “Lentil Apocalypse.” I poured lentils into the slow cooker until it was practically bursting at the seams. Next, I added what could only be described as an entire bottle of curry, along with a mountain of chopped onions and celery. Unsure of how long these lentils needed to avoid the dreaded “raw green beetle” look, I left them cooking all day. By the time I made my way to the picnic, the contents had morphed into what resembled a toxic waste spill, a sludge so thick it could be used to pave roads. With all the bravado of a culinary adventurer, I placed my slow cooker among the other dishes. As hours ticked by, my creation remained untouched. The English Chair, Solomon, seemed to take pity on me. He ladled a small portion onto his plate in a gesture of charity, but his reaction was nothing short of tragic. His face contorted in a way that suggested he’d just tasted a toxic waste dump, and he looked as if he might need a hazmat suit and a team of medics. From that day on, I was never again entrusted with bringing food. Instead, my muscles were put to better use hauling giant bags of ice, crates of wine glasses, and cartons of boxed wine to future events. Eventually, I learned my lesson and found my true calling—one that involved heavy lifting and zero culinary experiments. And so, I stayed in my lane, with a clear understanding that my talents were best suited for anything other than poisoning my colleagues with curried lentils.

    My ordeal points is an example of being Crock Blocked–the uniquely mortifying shame experienced when your potluck contribution—usually involving a Crock-Pot, misplaced ambition, and a suspiciously gelatinous texture—is avoided by everyone, like it’s radioactive. Crock Blocked is when your dish becomes a pariah on the buffet table, gathering flies instead of praise, while nearby casseroles are ravaged like it’s the last supper. You watch helplessly as guests whisper about “that lentil thing,” your dreams of impressing the crowd slowly congealing into a turmeric-scented failure. You leave with your dignity dented, your Crock-Pot still full, and your social standing demoted to Ice Guy.