Cinemorphosis

Category: Health and Fitness

  • From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    From Raw to Ruin: The Self-Destruction of a Crashfluencer

    To mock Brian Johnson, aka the Liver King, feels like low-hanging fruit off a poisoned ancestral tree. The man is a walking satirical sketch, a steroid-soaked cartoon preaching “natural living” while pumping $11,000 a month of growth hormone into his glutes. He branded himself the King, his wife the Queen, and his sons with names fit for a Mad Max reboot about a paleo militia family eating spleen jerky by moonlight.

    His entire enterprise was Caveman Cosplay with a GoPro: gnawing on cow testicles at a blood-slicked picnic table, barking into the void like a tribal prophet in a trucker hat. He promised salvation to a nation bloated on Cheetos, Twinkies, and Red Bull—offering raw liver as the Eucharist for the metabolically lost.

    Netflix’s Untold: The Liver King makes a flaccid attempt at chronicling his rise and fall. The documentary is weirdly deferential, like it’s afraid he’ll burst through the screen and challenge the viewer to a push-up contest. YouTube, in contrast, has done the real exhumation—countless videos dissecting his addiction to fame, vanity, and unregulated supplements with far more insight and bite.

    Still, the Netflix film does offer one crystalline moment of pathos-turned-parody: Johnson, preparing to repent for the lies and the deception and the overpriced ancestral liver gummies, admits on camera that he’ll need to Google the words “repentance” and “atonement” before proceeding. Imagine Martin Luther, nailing his Theses to the church door—then pulling out his phone to ask Siri what “contrition” means.

    The man is a moral dumpster fire, ablaze with the fumes of self-delusion, influencer marketing, and raw meat. But that dumpster fire casts a telling glow on the cultural cave we all inhabit—where attention is currency, truth is performative, and the algorithm rewards the loudest lunacy.

    So let us name what we’ve seen:

    • Brovangelism – The sacred zeal of gym bros converted to primal living by a shirtless messiah with abs and a coupon code.
    • Swoleblindness – The ability to overlook blatant fraud if the fraudster has veins on his deltoids.
    • Rawthenticity – Mistaking uncooked meat for unfiltered truth.
    • Cloutuary – A public, slow-motion social media death staged for likes and shares.
    • Crashfluencer – He went from virality to liability, taking his followers on a nosedive into madness.
    • Declinefluencer – An influencer whose main content is his own collapse.
    • Brandamaged – A man whose brand has outlived his dignity, but not his desperation.

    Watching Johnson spiral felt eerily familiar. It brought to mind Jaron Lanier’s Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, a book I once assigned to bright-eyed freshmen before they lost their souls to TikTok. Lanier warns that algorithmic performance rewires the brain, dragging us back to our reptilian roots. It doesn’t make us more “authentic”—it makes us worse. Dumber. Meaner. Hungrier for clicks and validation. Johnson is not just a cautionary tale. He’s the caution in full, swollen flesh—drenched in growth hormone and influencer pathology.

  • Perkatory: My Caffeinated Descent into Madness

    Perkatory: My Caffeinated Descent into Madness

    Sumatra coffee is my bad boy of the coffee world—dark, mysterious, and utterly unapologetic. It doesn’t just wake me up; it smacks me across the face, throws me out of bed, and chases me down the street while I’m still in my pajamas. Imagine if a tropical thunderstorm decided to moonlight as a barista, bottling up its fury in a cup. That’s Sumatra—every sip as intense as being caught in a downpour while you’re half-asleep and regretting every life choice that led you to this point.

    Sure, I’m probably guzzling more Sumatra dark roast than is recommended by anyone with a functioning heart, but let’s be real: I’m an overworked college writing professor, buried under an Everest of student assignments that multiply like rabbits on caffeine. Add to that the never-ending demands of an irrational writing obsession with a book titled The Absurdictionary: A Compendium of Comical Curiosities. The result? I keep churning out content until my fingers bleed.”

    But let’s not get ahead of ourselves with the self-pity party. I could give you a long-winded lecture about how the digital age was supposed to bring us more convenience and free time, only to morph into a merciless sociopath that steals our time faster than you can say “work-life balance.” But instead, let me talk about a condition I have from loving coffee too much. 

    Every morning at 6 sharp, like some deranged caffeinated monk, I stagger to the kitchen, where the sacred rite of coffee-making begins. This isn’t just a routine—it’s a holy sacrament that grants me the powers of focus, confidence, and the kind of superhuman alertness that helps me work on one of my best-selling coffee table humor books or grade college essays. The taste of that bitter coffee kissed with a hint of milk and a drop of liquid stevia, is nothing short of ambrosia. By 7 a.m., after downing two 18-ounce cups, I’ve ascended to a higher plane—a realm where I’m not just a man, but a writing, essay-grading, piano-playing, kettlebell-swinging demigod. I go through my day, shower, lunch, nap—rinse and repeat—like a well-oiled machine of productivity, albeit one lugging around a trunkful of neuroses and the social skills of a startled raccoon.

    But there’s this nagging little itch I can’t quite scratch: coffee. It’s more than just a drink at this point; it’s an obsession. Do I love coffee too much? Maybe. Do I worship the ritual a bit too fervently? Definitely. Throughout the day, this thought keeps tiptoeing into my mind like a ninja with a vendetta: “I can’t wait till tomorrow morning when I can make coffee again.” And then, the existential kicker: “Is my life just one endless loop of killing time between coffee sessions?”

    Pat myself on the back: I’ve crossed into a special kind of hell—a hell I’ve christened Perkatory. It’s not quite purgatory, but it’s close. It’s that torturous stretch of time where I’m just existing, dragging myself through the mind-numbing hours between one glorious cup of coffee and the next. It’s a slow-burning obsession that has taken over my life, turning everything else into the dull, gray filler content I’d skip if life had a fast-forward button.

    I remember those bleak, pre-coffee days of my youth—days when Perkatory wasn’t even a thing. Back then, life was simpler, more innocent, and tragically devoid of the caffeinated highs I now chase with the zeal of a junkie trying to recapture that first, glorious hit. But let’s be honest: there’s no going back. Perkatory is here to stay, like that annoying roommate who never does the dishes and steals your leftovers. I’m stuck in this never-ending cycle of waiting, longing, and counting down the hours until I can get my next hit of that sweet, sweet java.

    If you want to suffer like I do, study carefully the meaning of my chosen condition:

    Perkatory (n.): That jittery limbo between your first and fourth cup of coffee, where you’re too caffeinated to sit still but too mentally deranged to function. In Perkatory, time dilates, emails multiply like rabbits, and your heart taps out Morse code against your ribcage while your brain drafts a screenplay, solves climate change, and forgets your Wi-Fi password—simultaneously. It’s a state of spiritual unrest fueled by dark roast and delusion, where productivity feels imminent but never actually arrives. You’re not in hell, exactly—you’re just in line for another cup.

  • The Lie of 70s Bodybuilding

    The Lie of 70s Bodybuilding

    Nostalgia is a bald-faced liar in gold lamé posing trunks. It flexes in the mirror of your mind, oils itself up in false sentiment, and strikes a heroic pose while whispering sweet nothings about “the good old days.” I used to believe the 1970s were the Golden Age of bodybuilding—when men looked like Greek gods instead of mutant action figures, when steroids were used “responsibly,” like a fine wine instead of a meth pipe. I told myself those days were all about balance and aesthetics: a V-taper here, a bit of Arnold’s smirk there.

    But no—this is revisionist fantasy, gym-bro propaganda. The truth is, those bronzed demigods were gulping down more synthetic hormones than a lab rat in a Monsanto trial. “Moderate” steroid use? Please. Some of those guys had liver enzymes that could strip paint. Many didn’t make it to 50, their organs shriveled like sun-dried tomatoes while their biceps ballooned into oblivion.

    Yes, today’s physiques are grotesque parodies of humanity—more Pixar villain than Apollo—but don’t kid yourself that the ‘70s were some golden, health-conscious utopia. Body dysmorphia was already the unspoken sixth station in the posing routine. The mirrors were just less honest, and the delusion smelled faintly of Brut cologne and Joe Weider’s false promises.

  • Waiting for the Angels to Descend and Hand Me the Perfect Book Title on a Velvet Pillow

    Waiting for the Angels to Descend and Hand Me the Perfect Book Title on a Velvet Pillow

    After reading Emmanuel Carrère’s Yoga—a meandering, self-lacerating spiral of spiritual ambition, narcissism, and depressive collapse—I’ve found myself inspired, if not outright possessed, by the urge to write my own autobiographical novel. Not about yoga, of course. I have the flexibility of a rusted lawn chair. Mine would be about my lifelong addiction to exercise. Working title: Kettlebell.

    It has a certain Zen austerity to it. One word. Heavy. Spherical. Monastic. A blunt object and a metaphor all in one. A symbol of focus in a world engineered for entropy. While others turn to wine, weed, or weaponized mindfulness apps, I have turned to iron. Cold, unyielding, mildly concussive iron.

    Of course, I could flirt with cleverness—titles like The Church of Sweat or The Temple of Gains—but those reek of Instagram influencers and overpriced gym merch. Kettlebell is purer. But then again, Dumbbell tugs at me. It’s honest. It’s humiliating. It suggests what I secretly suspect: that I’ve spent a lifetime mistaking pain for virtue and resistance training for redemption. I am a Dumb Bell. A heavy object being swung around in circles, hoping to find peace through repetition.

    Still, perhaps I’m playing into the oldest self-help trap of them all—masquerading self-deprecation as enlightenment. Perhaps the search for the perfect title is simply a glorified avoidance ritual, a form of literary procrastination wrapped in velvet. Because deep down, I know the book isn’t just about fitness. It’s about how I’ve used discipline as anesthesia, reps as prayer beads, and physical exhaustion as a form of epistemology. I don’t know what God looks like, but I suspect He smells like workout chalk and vanilla protein shakes.

    Some mornings I feel like a garage-dwelling mystic, swinging kettlebells under flickering LED light, muttering mantras between sets. Other days I feel like an absurd parody of Sisyphus—except instead of rolling a boulder up a hill, I’m performing goblet squats in my tattered gym shorts, chasing transcendence in 30-second rest intervals.

    And now, on the brink of another workout, I’m wasting precious calories spiraling into a metaphysical title crisis. Maybe the perfect name will descend from the sky, borne aloft by angels in sweatbands and Lululemon, whispering, “This is it. This is your brand.” They will hand me the title on a velvet pillow. Or maybe I’ll figure it out in the middle of a brutal set, when my soul finally detaches from my body like a spent shell casing and whispers, “Just call it Garage Monk and be done with it.”

    One way or another, the iron awaits. And it does not care what the book is called.

  • The Church of Sweat: 50 Years in the Iron Cathedral

    The Church of Sweat: 50 Years in the Iron Cathedral

    By the time I hit fourteen, my sacred sanctuary was none other than Walt’s Gym in Hayward, California—a temple of iron that had started its inglorious life as a chicken coop in the 1950s. The place was a veritable swamp of fungus and bacteria, a thriving petri dish of maladies eager to latch onto the unsuspecting. Members whispered in hushed tones about incurable athlete’s foot, the kind that made dermatologists throw up their hands in defeat. Some swore that the strains of fungus and mold festering in the corners were so exotic they had yet to be classified by the most intrepid of mycologists. Roosting among the fungal shower stalls was an oversized frog that the pro wrestlers had affectionately named Charlie. I never saw Charlie myself, but I often wondered if he was a real creature or a figment of the wrestlers’ imagination, birthed by too many concussions and late-night benders.

    The locker room was perpetually occupied by a rotating cast of characters who looked like they’d been plucked straight out of a grimy noir film. There was always some bankrupt divorcee draped in a velour tracksuit and a gold chain thick enough to anchor a ship, hogging the payphone for marathon sessions with his attorney. He’d discuss his sordid life choices and the staggering attorney fees required to sweep his past under a rug large enough to cover the entire state of California.

    Out back, an unused swimming pool lurked, its water murky and black—a cauldron of plague, dead rats, and God knows what else. Walt, the gym’s owner and part-time crypt keeper, had a peculiar ritual. Every so often, he’d saunter outside, brandishing a pool net like a scepter, and scoop up some unfortunate deceased creature. He’d hold it aloft for all to see, like a demented priest presenting an unholy sacrament. This grim ceremony was invariably met with a thunderous round of applause from the gym-goers, who treated Walt’s rodent exorcisms like a halftime show. Walt would then toss the cadaver into a nearby dumpster with all the flourish of a Shakespearean actor delivering a monologue, bowing deeply as if he’d just conquered a dragon.

    Walt’s Gym showcased a walking fossil named Wally, an octogenarian who swore he was the original model for human anatomy textbooks—perhaps ones etched on cave walls. We all loved Wally. He was a beloved gym fixture even though he could be a pain in the butt. Wally’s routine was the stuff of myth: He’d righteously correct everyone’s form whether they asked for his advice or not. He’d monopolize the gym for hours, his workout punctuated by monologues worthy of an Oscar about his deadbeat relatives who “borrowed” money, his former lovers who once graced the silver screen, and his eternal battle with arthritis. 

    Between sets, he’d often deliver a Ted Talk on muscle inflammation and the sorry state of the national economy. He delivered these soliloquies with the gravitas of a news anchor, then spent an eternity in the sauna and shower, emerging like a phoenix from the ashes only to douse himself head-to-toe in talcum powder, turning into a spectral beacon of gym dedication. When Wally spoke, he was engulfed in such a thick talcum haze you’d swear a lighthouse was about to blare its foghorn warning.

    The radio played the same hits on a relentless loop, as if the DJ had been possessed by the spirit of a broken record. Elvin Bishop’s “Fooled Around and Fell in Love,” The Eagles’ “New Kid in Town,” and Norman Connors’ “You Are My Starship” echoed through the gym like a soundtrack to my personal purgatory. As a kid navigating this adult world, the gym was my barbershop, my public square, where I eavesdropped on conversations about divorces, hangovers, gambling addictions, financial ruin, the exorbitant costs of sending kids to college, and the soul-sucking burdens of caring for elderly parents.

    It dawned on me then that I was at fourteen the perfect age: old enough to start building biceps like bowling balls, yet young enough to be spared the drudgery and tedium of adult life. Being a teenage bodybuilder, I realized, was all about sidestepping the real world entirely. Why bother with mortgages and 401(k)s when I could disappear into my true paradise, the gym? As Arnold himself wrote in Arnold: The Education of a Bodybuilder, the gym was the ultimate Happy Place: “The weight lifters shone with sweat; they were powerful looking. Herculean. And there it was before me—my life, the answer I’d been seeking. It clicked. It was something I suddenly just seemed to reach out and find, as if I’d been crossing a suspended bridge and finally stepped off onto solid ground.”

    Half a century later, I still have my version of Walt’s Gym—but now it’s a dimly lit garage filled with kettlebells and echoes. For the last ten years, it’s been my sanctuary, my forge, my private dojo where I swing iron spheres like a monk practicing some ancient, sweat-soaked ritual. No mirrors, no peacocks, no pop music—just me, gravity, and the stubborn pulse of something that refuses to quit.

    At nearly 64, I still wake up with the twitchy vigor of a teenager mainlining pre-workout, though now it’s fueled by habit and existential resolve rather than hormones and vanity. Friends—well-meaning, gray-templed philosophers—remind me that we’re each born with a finite reservoir of Life Force, that it burns down like a fuse, and that it’s only sensible to bow to biology, show gratitude, and pace ourselves. All true. But I also know that left unchecked, my own Life Force has a history of going rogue—dragging me into self-destructive spirals like a moth to a Molotov cocktail. So I remind myself, daily, that power without purpose is a demolition derby in my own skull.

    Still, when I think of Walt’s Gym, I remember that giddy, foolish optimism of youth—that belief that life was nothing but expansion, growth, and muscle gains. And weirdly, I still feel that same charge now. Same source, different vintage. That current is still flowing through me, unruly and alive. The only real difference? I no longer try to bottle it. I just hold on and let it do its work.

  • From Sweat Temple to Spa Prison: My Gym Breakup Story

    From Sweat Temple to Spa Prison: My Gym Breakup Story

    There was a time, back in the sepia-toned haze of the 1970s, when the gym was my church and iron was my sacrament. I was a teenage bodybuilder, baptized in sweat and testosterone, and the gym was a crude sanctuary—part locker room, part gladiator pit—where you could grunt, curse, and lift until your eyeballs threatened to pop like grapes. No frills, no air freshener, no nonsense. Just clang, bang, and the occasional chest-pounding primal scream.

    Then came the 1980s, when gyms got a makeover. They went corporate. The rusted barbells got swapped for chrome. The boom boxes were silenced in favor of syrupy pop music so chirpy it made your teeth ache. Suddenly, everyone wore genie pants and strutted between machines like peacocks dipped in glitter. I soldiered on, of course, slogging through the artificial sweetness and protein-powdered small talk. But the joy had drained from the dumbbells.

    By 2005, I snapped. The gym had become a perfume counter with resistance bands. I fled to the one place where the spirit of muscle still breathed: my garage. I bought a set of kettlebells and never looked back. No waiting for equipment. No toe fungus lurking in communal showers. No ex-frat boys flexing in front of mirrors while discussing their smoothie macros. Just me, my iron cannonballs, and the relentless clang of salvation.

    As I reflect on my exile from Gym Nation, I’ve made peace with my reasons. Let me count the ways:

    I like people. I enjoy storytelling, especially if it involves morally questionable behavior and a dash of scandal. But I can’t dish gossip and deadlift at the same time. I’m not that talented. The gym wants you to be a social butterfly with deltoids, but I want solitude and sweat.

    I used to catch colds with the regularity of a school nurse—four times a year like clockwork. Every cardio machine was a petri dish disguised as fitness equipment.

    And don’t get me started on the showers. You haven’t known dread until you’ve seen a septuagenarian air-drying his nether regions for forty-five minutes like a puffy white heron. Showering was a biohazard. Not showering meant marinating in my own musk, turning my car into a rolling terrarium of mildew and despair.

    Gyms also close for holidays, which is when I need them most—Thanksgiving rage, New Year’s guilt, Fourth-of-July shame. My garage, on the other hand, never takes a day off. It’s always open, always angry, always welcoming.

    And the waiting. Dear God, the waiting. I train fast, like I’m running from the ghosts of carbs past. Having to wait ten minutes for a squat rack while someone scrolls Instagram is a crime against the pump.

    I spent about a thousand bucks on kettlebells, from 10 to 80 pounds. That may sound steep, but compared to a decade of gas, membership fees, and viral exposure? It’s a steal.

    This garage of mine—it’s not just a space. It’s a holy temple of kettlebell discipline. A shrine to simplicity, sweat, and solitude. And I’ll keep swinging those iron orbs until I drop dead—or transcend into Valhalla, kettlebell in hand.

  • The Ascent of Proteinberg: One Man’s Daily Siege Against Carbs and Chaos

    The Ascent of Proteinberg: One Man’s Daily Siege Against Carbs and Chaos

    Each morning begins with a stare-down: me versus Proteinberg, the Everest of self-discipline, rising from my fridge like a smug Nordic god carved from blocks of Greek yogurt and slabs of salmon. It’s a cruel, relentless climb, strewn with the jagged boulders of eggs, tempeh, sardines, cottage cheese, soy milk, and the occasional whey protein landslide. Somewhere near the summit: a dollop of smug self-respect, earned only after choking down what tastes like Poseidon’s bait bucket mixed with barnyard runoff.

    I’m 63, not that you’d guess it from the size of the kettlebells I swing five days a week like I’m auditioning for a reboot of 300: The 63-Year-Old Man Edition. My battle isn’t just with gravity—it’s with the creeping, gelatinous blob of abdominal fat that lurks like a metabolic Grim Reaper, threatening dementia, stroke, and the kind of death that begins with a raspy wheeze and ends in a hospital bed full of regret.

    Climbing Proteinberg is my daily salvation. Miss a day, and the Carb Demons come knocking—those sugar-slick phantoms with snacky grins and buttery claws. They whisper of bagels and donuts, hijack my brain, and leave me sugar-drunk and shame-stained before lunch. But summit the Proteinberg? I walk tall. Satiated. Slightly disgusted, yes, but victorious.

    It’s not just food. It’s ritual. It’s order in the chaos. A daily anchor in the storm of temptations that masquerade as comfort. As my wife brews her potent dark roast each dawn, the scent hits me like a monk’s bell calling me to vespers. I rise. I eat. I fight. I win. There is meaning in the climb, purpose in the discipline, and if not happiness, then at least its lean, unsalted cousin: peace.

  • When Life Falls Apart, Just Check the Lume: A Watch-macologist’s Guide to Resilience

    When Life Falls Apart, Just Check the Lume: A Watch-macologist’s Guide to Resilience

  • Trapped in the Sauna: When Bro Talk Becomes Brain Fog

    Trapped in the Sauna: When Bro Talk Becomes Brain Fog

    I’m 63, I live in the suburbs, and I like to sweat, laugh, and think—ideally all in the same day. I’ve got a soft spot for health and fitness talk, well-produced comedy, and podcasts where the ideas land harder than the punchlines. Back in the day, I gave Joe Rogan some ear time—especially when he had guests like Michael Pollan who could string together a sentence without referencing elk meat or hallucinogens. The show scratched a certain male itch: that longing for a tribal fire pit where you could grunt, swap kettlebell routines, and talk nonsense without getting side-eyed.

    I got it. I really did. There was a certain charm in the early years—the man cave as refuge, not bunker. A place for unapologetic masculinity that wasn’t trying to sell you a four-pack of testosterone supplements and a tactical flashlight.

    But then something changed. The man cave didn’t evolve—it ossified. It turned into a walled-off compound of grievance, smug anti-intellectualism, and half-baked conspiracy theories passed around like a tray of stale edibles. What once felt like a mixed bag of bro-science and genuine curiosity devolved into a middle-aged lunch table where the same unfunny comedians riff about whiskeys, bow hunting, and whether they’d survive a bear attack armed only with sarcasm and nicotine gum.

    So when I stumbled across Ghost Gum’s YouTube essay “The Collapse of the Joe Rogan Verse,” I hit play with morbid curiosity—and found it eerily validating. Turns out, I wasn’t alone in sensing that Rogan’s podcast had turned into a predictable, self-congratulatory echo chamber, where counterarguments go to die and every guest seems contractually obligated to flatter the host.

    The video’s roast of Tom Segura was especially brutal—and fair. Once the chubby, relatable everyman, Segura now floats in orbit around Planet Rogan, sneering at the unwashed masses like a guy who did keto once and now thinks he’s better than you. His comedy used to punch up; now it just punches down and preens.

    Comedy rooted in tribal loyalty becomes fan service, then becomes boring, then becomes embarrassing. What began as a countercultural clubhouse has curdled into a locker room thick with stale air and self-importance.

    Maybe Joe Rogan was once a necessary irritant to polite discourse, a reminder that the man cave had value. But too much time in that space without fresh air—and you forget it was never meant to be a throne room.

    Perhaps Joe Rogan’s unraveling podcast is just another cautionary tale of what happens when someone marinates too long in their own echo chamber and starts mistaking the sound of agreement for the sound of wisdom. Spend enough time surrounded by yes-men and protein powder, and eventually, you’re just getting high on your own supply—delirious with self-importance and blind to the rot setting in.

  • The Vegan Martyr of Suburbia

    The Vegan Martyr of Suburbia

    This is a story soaked in irony, clucking with heartbreak. It’s the tale of Ned Pearlman, a 63-year-old man whose conscience became his personal executioner.

    Ned was a lifelong weightlifter, a barrel-chested patriarch with calloused hands and a back catalog of deadlift anecdotes. When egg prices began to flirt with the absurd, his family took the Depression-era route and bought chickens. Backyard livestock as economic strategy.

    They started with a humble flock—a few hens, a rooster, and one poorly socialized silkie that pecked at everyone’s ankles. But something shifted in Ned. The hens began following him around the yard like starstruck interns. The rooster started presenting Ned with tributes: gum wrappers, pocket change, ornamental twigs. It was clear—Ned was the alpha.

    At night, the chickens would nestle beside him in bed, each with its own green velvet pillow like feathery courtiers in a royal suite. Ned, a man once fueled by steaks and protein shakes, looked into their beady eyes and saw innocent souls. Souls that changed him. He went vegan overnight.

    Not just vegan—missionary vegan. He researched. He supplemented. He downed algae-based omega-3s and pea protein smoothies that tasted like damp cardboard soaked in guilt. He clocked in 180 grams of protein a day, but his body, unimpressed by numbers, absorbed barely a fraction. The mighty Ned began to shrink.

    He became fatigued, confused. The barbell mocked him. His once-proud biceps began to resemble disillusioned baguettes. Despite his family’s desperate pleas—“just some yogurt, Ned, or a scoop of whey!”—he remained unwavering. This was a moral epiphany, not a diet. Animal products were betrayal. Flexibility was sin.

    Soon, the man who once bench-pressed lawn furniture was bedridden and showing signs of rapid cognitive decline. His doctor called it malnutrition-induced dementia. Ned called it sacrifice.

    His family, feeling abandoned, visited him rarely—guilt-visitations sprinkled in between Facebook posts and emotional exhaustion. But the chickens stayed. Loyal. Soft. Slightly judgmental. And the geriatric facility, either out of mercy or lack of clear policy, let them roost near him.

    One sunny afternoon, Ned was wheeled onto the grass. The chickens gathered around him, forming a feathered perimeter. In a rare moment of clarity, he looked to the sky and muttered, “Why, dear God, did my health not align with my ethics? Why must my clean conscience kill me and alienate those I love?”

    He received no reply. The clouds rolled by in soft indifference. Ned closed his eyes and died, flanked by his beaked apostles, surrounded by the warm, gentle souls that had rewritten his values—and slowly drained his life.