Cinemorphosis

Category: music

  • You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    You Can’t Explain Beethoven

    In his autobiographical novel The Kingdom, Emmanuel Carrère revisits the three years in his thirties when he became an intensely devoted Christian. Looking back, he is both fascinated and bewildered by the man he once was. He cannot decide whether those years of fervent faith represented a genuine encounter with God or a desperate attempt to survive depression and a crippling creative drought. He wonders whether, like Paul on the road to Damascus, he underwent a kind of mutation—and whether his later deconversion into agnosticism is simply another mutation of the self.

    What is striking is that Carrère refuses to declare one mutant superior to the other.

    He does not write as the triumphant rationalist looking back with condescension upon his younger, credulous self. Nor does he portray his conversion as the last moment of authentic truth before an unfortunate fall into unbelief. He extends equal curiosity to both versions of himself, unable to say with confidence which one saw reality more clearly. The believer and the agnostic remain locked in an unresolved conversation.

    Carrère also discovers an unexpected kinship with Luke. Both are storytellers. Both understand that narratives do more than report events—they persuade, shape memory, create identity, and sometimes become civilization’s most enduring myths.

    For this reason, Carrère navigates the Acts of the Apostles and Paul’s letters with impressive confidence. They invite historical investigation. They provoke questions of authorship, chronology, motive, and psychology. They reward the tools of criticism.

    Luke’s Gospel is different.

    When Carrère arrives there, his confidence evaporates.

    He becomes, in his own word, “speechless.”

    He wonders whether his silence arises because so much of Luke is imaginative, because it overflows with piety, because too many of its characters seem to exist without obvious historical models—or because approaching such a text without “fear and trembling” renders the entire exercise meaningless.

    That question reveals something profound.

    Analyzing Luke’s Gospel solely as an academic artifact begins to resemble explaining Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony through harmonic analysis while ignoring the experience of hearing it performed. The music may be dissected measure by measure, every modulation cataloged, every motif traced, yet none of that explains why generations have emerged from it transformed. It would be like arguing for Beethoven’s artistic greatness by comparing chord progressions with Debby Boone’s “You Light Up My Life.” Such an argument would be absurd. The argument may be persuasive, but it somehow misses the thing that made the work worth discussing in the first place.

    Luke’s Gospel confronts Carrère with what I call Reverential Limits: the recognition that certain works of art, literature, and religion cannot be fully understood through detached analysis alone because they also demand awe, imagination, and existential participation.

    This realization is one of the reasons The Kingdom rises above the familiar memoir of conversion or deconversion. It refuses the tidy architecture of books entitled Why I Became an X or Why I Am No Longer an X. Those books usually know their destination before the first page is written. They exist to prosecute a case and deliver a verdict.

    Carrère’s novel has a more ambitious purpose.

    It preserves wonder.

    The farther he investigates Christianity, the less eager he becomes to reduce it to a slogan, a certainty, or a manifesto. He discovers that the deepest encounters with great religion resemble the deepest encounters with great art. They resist summary. They refuse domestication. They leave us, not with the smug satisfaction of having solved the mystery, but with the unsettling realization that the mystery has somehow enlarged us.

    Sometimes the highest form of understanding is not another argument.

    Sometimes it is speechlessness.

  • Christmas Lights in July

    Christmas Lights in July

    Venado Court in San Jose was my childhood Garden of Eden. Even now I can summon its atmosphere with embarrassing ease. Roses and honeysuckle drifted through the air alongside the unmistakable perfume of fabric softener escaping from open laundry rooms. Every front yard looked as though it had been groomed for a magazine cover, with dazzling flowerbeds and lawns so immaculate they bordered on moral instruction. My friends and I wandered this paradise clutching Matchboxes, Hot Wheels, and G.I. Joes as if they were sacred relics. Somewhere nearby, a transistor radio played the Beatles’ “Penny Lane,” giving the neighborhood its own soundtrack.

    Then came the summer of 1969.

    My friend Billy and I circled the court on our brand-new bicycles. The weather was impossibly beautiful—warm enough for shorts yet accompanied by a gentle drizzle. Rain in July felt less like weather than divine improvisation. The tiny drops landed on our faces with such tenderness that they stirred emotions we were too young to name. We rode through them in a state bordering on ecstasy.

    But the drizzle was merely the opening act.

    Across a distant field, we saw a flashing blue light.

    There could be only one explanation.

    Christmas.

    Not ordinary Christmas.

    Christmas in July.

    One of us shouted, “Christmas lights!”

    The other echoed it immediately, as though confirming a revelation.

    We stared at that flickering blue light with complete conviction. Somewhere beyond the field, impossible things were happening. Surely Christmas pies were cooling on windowsills. Presents were being opened. Eggnog was flowing despite the summer heat. Somewhere, a family had escaped the tyranny of the calendar and was celebrating the most magical day of the year whenever it pleased.

    The details scarcely mattered. What mattered was that we believed.

    Again and again we shouted, “Christmas lights!” like two ecstatic prophets announcing a miracle no one else had yet noticed.

    Looking back, I think Billy and I had fallen under what I call the Christmas Light Effect: the tendency of children to transform an ambiguous sensory stimulus into an overwhelming experience of wonder, allowing imagination to construct a reality far richer than the physical evidence deserves.

    Children are gloriously terrible empiricists. They see one flashing light and invent an entire civilization around it.

    That memory returned to me while reading Emmanuel Carrère’s account of his conversion through the Gospel of John.

    While Emmanuel attended a church reading, Father Xavier came to the familiar story of Peter and the other disciples returning to their fishing boats after Jesus’ death. A stranger appeared on the shore and instructed them to cast their nets on the right side of the boat. The nets came back so heavy with fish that they immediately recognized the stranger.

    It was the Lord.

    Then Carrère encountered a passage that appeared shortly after, one that struck him with the force of personal revelation.

    Jesus tells Peter that when he grows old, he will no longer dress himself. Others will lead him where he would rather not go.

    For most readers, the verse slips quietly past.

    For Carrère, it exploded.

    He heard it saying something altogether different:

    “Let yourself go. It is no longer you who leads.”

    He experienced what I think of as Vocational Gravity: the force exerted by a calling, an idea, or a divine command that gradually pulls a person away from the life he naturally prefers toward one he never would have chosen for himself.

    The attraction is strangely paradoxical.

    Surrender promises relief because the burden of self-authorship is lifted. Yet it also demands obedience. The force now directing your life has no obligation to respect your preferences. It will lead you into unfamiliar country, asking you to exchange comfort for transformation.

    Remarkably, Carrère realized that this was precisely what he wanted. He wanted to stop navigating by the small compass of his own desires. He wanted to be led somewhere beyond himself, even if the journey required walking directly toward the places he instinctively avoided.

    I cannot help wondering whether the Christmas Light Effect and Vocational Gravity are distant cousins.

    Perhaps both begin with the same interruption.

    Something flashes unexpectedly on the horizon.

    To everyone else it is merely another blue light.

    To you it is Christmas.

    Or God.

    Or your vocation.

    Or the beginning of a completely different life.

    Perhaps religion begins there—not with certainty, but with enchantment. A person catches sight of something that others dismiss as ordinary and cannot look away. Imagination awakens first, faith follows behind, and before long the old map of life no longer seems adequate. Comfort loses its authority. A new destination appears over the horizon.

    Most people keep riding.

    A few turn their bicycles toward the mysterious blue light. And once they do, they discover that the real miracle was never waiting in the distant field.

    It was the willingness to believe there might be something there worth finding.

  • The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose

    The Great Lachyrmose was the stage name bestowed upon Jeff McMahon, a college writing student, bodybuilder, and part-time laborer at Jackson’s Wine and Spirits on Tunnel Road beside the Claremont Hotel. From 1983 to 1987, the store hosted wine tastings three evenings a week. There were bottles from Bordeaux, Napa, and Tuscany, a polished grand piano in the corner, and customers who came expecting Cabernet, Brie, and melancholy in equal measure.

    The ritual never varied.

    McMahon would be hidden away in the walk-in cooler stacking cases of beer or downstairs wrestling heavy crates of wine. His black T-shirt was perpetually torn, his forearms tattooed with cardboard abrasions, nicks from broken bottles, and fresh cuts courtesy of overzealous box cutters. He looked less like a concert pianist than a dockworker who had taken a wrong turn into a music conservatory.

    Soon someone at the tasting bar would ask, “Where’s Lachyrmose?”

    Another voice would join in. Then another. Before long the room itself seemed to chant for him.

    Store owner Solomon Khan, who understood that theater sells almost as well as Chardonnay, would smile knowingly. If every chair around the tasting bar had been claimed, he would haul out more until the room resembled an impromptu recital hall. Only then would the Great Lachyrmose make his entrance, emerging dramatically from the cellar or the refrigerator like some wounded Romantic hero ascending from the underworld.

    Without ceremony he would sit at the piano and spend the next hour filling the room with mournful nocturnes, elegiac waltzes, and slow-moving ballades that drifted through the store like woodsmoke on a winter evening. Conversations softened. Wine glasses paused halfway to waiting lips. Even the cash register seemed embarrassed to interrupt.

    The most enchanting audience members were the neighborhood’s young mothers.

    They would arrive carrying restless infants whose nightly resistance to sleep had exhausted every parental strategy except surrender. Somehow the Great Lachyrmose accomplished what rocking chairs, lullabies, and desperate pacing could not. One melancholy piano piece after another worked its quiet spell until tiny eyelids surrendered. The babies collapsed into peaceful sleep with astonishing reliability. Their grateful parents would offer Lachyrmose a smile and a gentle nod before slipping out into the Berkeley night, precious cargo cradled carefully in their arms.

    It became one of the strangest guarantees in town. Jackson’s could promise good wine. Lachyrmose could promise sleeping babies.

    As the years passed, however, something inside the pianist began to shift. He grew restless with his own success. He wanted brighter harmonies, quicker tempos, unexpected turns. He wanted music that laughed as often as it sighed.

    His audience revolted.

    The regulars did not come for experimentation. They came for emotional comfort. They wanted the familiar sorrow they had come to love, returning to those melancholy melodies with the same devotion families reserve for a grandmother’s chicken pot pie. Every new composition was politely tolerated before someone inevitably asked for one of the old sad songs.

    Success had quietly become a cage.

    The Great Lachyrmose had become a prisoner of his own repertoire.

    So when McMahon accepted his first college teaching position, he quietly retired the character and left Jackson’s behind. For the first time, he could play whatever music interested him rather than whatever melancholy his audience wished to hear.

    He gained artistic freedom, but he lost something as well.

    He lost the strange little community that had gathered around a grand piano in the corner of a wine shop. He lost the nightly ritual of emerging from the cellar to a room full of expectant faces. He lost the grateful parents carrying sleeping babies into the darkness.

    Even now, decades later, he occasionally misses the Great Lachyrmose. The music has changed. Life has changed. But belonging—that rare feeling that one’s peculiar gifts answer someone else’s unspoken need—is not so easily replaced.

  • A Hundred Calories, Elaine Pagels, and Dvořák

    A Hundred Calories, Elaine Pagels, and Dvořák

    Yesterday I came within one hundred calories of eating only three meals.

    Around 7:30 in the evening, I made my daughter a bowl of oatmeal with protein powder, sliced peaches, banana, and vanilla unsweetened soy milk. She lost interest before she finished. Three lonely tablespoons remained in the bowl.

    As I carried it to the sink, a familiar voice appeared.

    “Don’t let perfectly good food go to waste.”

    Naturally, I obeyed.

    I polished off the leftovers before rinsing the bowl, thereby adding roughly one hundred unnecessary calories to my day under the noble banner of environmental stewardship.

    It’s remarkable how virtue always volunteers to represent appetite in court.

    Oddly enough, I didn’t feel especially guilty. One hundred calories is hardly the nutritional equivalent of robbing a bank.

    Later that evening, while my wife visited with friends, I watched Perfect Days. It is one of those rare films that quietly restores your faith in ordinary goodness. Its protagonist cleans public toilets with such humility and grace that he makes most ambitious people seem spiritually impoverished.

    The film’s generous silences reminded me of La Strada. Both movies revolve around souls so guileless they expose the vulgarity of everyone around them. As I watched Perfect Days, I kept thinking, This has the same moral weather as La Strada.

    Yesterday also taught me three lessons.

    The first concerns hunger.

    Going five or six hours between lunch and dinner is uncomfortable.

    That’s all.

    It isn’t torture.

    It isn’t a crisis.

    It isn’t an emergency requiring immediate intervention by almonds, protein bars, or peanut butter.

    It’s simply a mild inconvenience.

    Seeing it stripped of melodrama made me realize something about myself. If I insist on pampering every small discomfort, I’ll never accomplish anything worthwhile. I have no trouble punishing myself on the Airdyne or during a hard kettlebell workout. Physical exertion doesn’t intimidate me.

    Resisting the urge to snack?

    That turns out to be the harder discipline.

    And that’s precisely why I need to practice it.

    The goal is straightforward: 230 pounds down to 210.

    No heroics.

    Just consistency.

    The second lesson concerned reading.

    Or rather, the uncomfortable realization that I haven’t really been reading.

    Twice I “read” Elaine Pagels’ Why Religion? on my Kindle.

    Now I’m listening to the audiobook.

    The difference is almost embarrassing.

    The audiobook has revealed a memoir that is moving, intellectually rich, and deeply humane. I feel as though I’m absorbing ten times more than I ever did with the Kindle. My earlier readings now strike me less as acts of reading than as acts of turning pages while my mind wandered off to inspect some unrelated shiny object.

    Apparently my eyes were reading.

    My brain had clocked out.

    The only way I genuinely read on a Kindle is as a form of critical study. I sit at my desktop with the Kindle open on one monitor and Google Docs on the other. I take notes, write commentary, formulate questions, and argue with the author. That’s reading.

    Collapsing into bed with a Kindle at night turns out to be something else entirely.

    I’m beginning to suspect that bedtime belongs to printed books or audiobooks, while the Kindle belongs at my desk, where it can be interrogated rather than merely glanced at.

    Ironically, as I write this, another possibility occurs to me. Perhaps a split-screen setup on my laptop—with the Kindle on one side and Google Docs on the other—would recreate that same active engagement away from my desktop.

    That idea sounds far better now than it did five minutes ago.

    The third lesson came courtesy of Dvořák.

    Ever since buying a Marshall Stanmore III for the bedroom, I’ve fallen even more deeply in love with classical music. Last night I typed Dvořák’s name into the SiriusXM search bar, and the app rewarded me with an endless procession of Eastern European composers.

    The sound pouring out of that speaker is breathtaking.

    Rich.

    Warm.

    Expansive.

    The music doesn’t merely occupy the room.

    It ennobles it.

    In fact, it may be sabotaging my Kindle reading. Faced with music that beautiful, why would I pay attention to the printed page? The orchestra wins every time.

    Then bedtime arrives.

    I reach for the power button.

    And a strange thought enters my mind.

    Turning off music this beautiful feels almost morally questionable.

    Surely another symphony wouldn’t hurt.

    Perhaps just one more movement.

    This is, I admit, the most luxurious problem I’ve ever had.

    I won’t lose sleep over it.

    If my greatest dilemma is choosing between Dvořák and Elaine Pagels before bed, I have wandered into the safest corner of the First World.

  • The Speaker That Ate My Bedroom

    The Speaker That Ate My Bedroom

    A month ago, I reached my breaking point with the smart speakers in my house.

    I finally accepted an uncomfortable truth: they were not smart.

    They were the technological equivalent of an overconfident waiter who gets every order wrong while insisting he knows exactly what you want. Every interaction became an argument. When I asked for Bach, I got Led Zeppelin. When I asked for jazz, I got information about a music festival in a pumpkin patch somewhere near Santa Cruz. The speakers spent less time serving me than forcing me into a hostage negotiation with their algorithms.

    I found myself shouting at inanimate objects far more often than seemed healthy.

    Something had to change.

    The first casualty was the kitchen speaker.

    I removed it and replaced it with a Marshall Acton III. The improvement was immediate. Music sounded richer, podcasts sounded fuller, and the speaker itself looked handsome sitting on the countertop. Instead of feeling like a piece of disposable technology, it felt like a piece of furniture with a purpose.

    Before long, I wanted the same experience in the bedroom.

    Buying a second Acton III would have been the sensible decision, but sensible decisions are not always the most entertaining. I measured the space on my bedside table and convinced myself that I needed an upgrade. Thus began my journey into the upper reaches of Bluetooth speaker excess.

    I ordered a Marshall Stanmore III.

    Larger than the Acton and packing more power, the Stanmore occupies a different class of speaker altogether. It is less a Bluetooth speaker than a luxury liner disguised as one.

    Appropriately enough, it arrived on Father’s Day.

    When I opened the box, I experienced a moment of panic.

    This thing was enormous.

    I placed it on my bedside table and immediately began comparing it to the Acton. I played classical music. I played podcasts. I switched back and forth.

    And then I arrived at an awkward conclusion.

    The difference wasn’t dramatic.

    If the Stanmore sounded better—and I believe it did—the improvement was subtle. The Acton III had already crossed the threshold where additional performance produces diminishing returns. The smaller speaker would have been more than sufficient.

    Unfortunately, that observation leads to the painful portion of this review.

    The Stanmore dominates the room.

    Not physically.

    Psychologically.

    Its presence reminds me of John Cheever’s short story “The Enormous Radio,” in which a household appliance gradually takes on an outsized role in a family’s life. The Stanmore radiates a similar energy.

    It seems to say:

    “I’m not here merely to play music. I’m here to become the main character.”

    The speaker sits beside my bed like an ambitious monarch surveying its kingdom.

    “Look at me,” it seems to whisper. “Notice my beautiful cabinet. Admire my brass controls. Listen to my glorious sound. Rearrange your priorities around me.”

    It is a speaker with the confidence of a cruise ship.

    I’m hoping adaptation will solve the problem.

    Five months ago, when I bought a G-Shock Frogman, its enormous size dominated my wrist. For weeks I felt as though I had strapped a small appliance to my arm. Then something curious happened. My eyes adjusted. The watch stopped looking gigantic and started looking normal.

    I’m hoping the same thing happens with the Stanmore.

    At the moment, however, when I lie in bed, I remain acutely aware of its presence. It looms beside me like a luxury ocean liner docked next to a studio apartment.

    Sometimes I feel as though I should christen it properly.

    Perhaps I should smash a champagne bottle against its side before asking it to play Mendelssohn’s Scottish Symphony.

    And yet, despite my complaints, I find myself increasingly charmed by the thing.

    The more I listen, the better it sounds.

    The strings grow richer. The voices become warmer. The music seems to expand beyond the walls of the room.

    Perhaps that is the secret behind all successful indulgences. At first they feel excessive, even absurd. Then, little by little, they win their case.

    I suspect the Stanmore III is doing exactly that.

    The cruise ship has arrived in port.

    Now I just need to stop staring at its size and enjoy the voyage.

  • The Promised Planet

    The Promised Planet

    One afternoon, drifting into a post-workout nap after a particularly glorious kettlebell session, I heard a famous writer tell a popular podcaster that nobody reads books anymore.

    Nobody.

    Not even him.

    He explained that social media had colonized his attention span. Years of feeding his narcissism to the digital machine had apparently consumed whatever brain cells were once responsible for sustained reading. There was something startling about hearing this confession from a public intellectual. It was like hearing a Michelin-starred chef announce that he now survives entirely on vending-machine burritos.

    The timing could not have been worse.

    I had recently completed writing a collection of fifteen stories. I had spent years dragging them through countless revisions, rescuing them from weaker incarnations, sanding rough edges, amputating dead passages, and rebuilding them sentence by sentence until they finally resembled what they were supposed to become. I was absurdly proud of them. I glowed with satisfaction. My pecs still felt inflated from kettlebell presses, and my literary vanity was enjoying a similar state of expansion.

    Then reality barged into the room.

    Nobody reads anymore.

    A bestselling author now sells perhaps ten thousand copies and celebrates as though he has conquered Gaul. An obscure author such as myself sells precisely zero. The arithmetic was not encouraging. My glow dimmed. My pumped-up ego suffered a rapid deflation.

    That evening I climbed into bed feeling mildly bereaved. I instructed my smart speaker to play classical music. It responded by offering business reports. I asked again. It played ZZ Top. I asked a third time. More ZZ Top. By the tenth attempt, after what felt like a hostage negotiation, it finally surrendered and delivered Johann Sebastian Bach.

    As the music drifted through the room, I picked up several books.

    I didn’t care about any of them.

    I tried another.

    Nothing.

    I opened my Amazon wishlist and scrolled through hundreds of titles accumulated over years of optimism. History. Biography. Philosophy. Literature. Politics. Books I had once believed would transform my life.

    I wanted none of them.

    It wasn’t exactly boredom. It wasn’t exactly depression. It was something murkier—a kind of spiritual flatness. An intellectual anemia.

    Part of my mood may have stemmed from guilt. My wife and twin daughters were exploring London and Paris. I had stayed behind. The long flights felt intolerable, and if I was honest, my curiosity about Europe had faded. I had wandered its streets decades earlier. Returning now felt like rereading a novel whose plot I already knew. The enchantment was gone.

    I comforted myself with thoughts of an upcoming family trip to Miami. A five-hour flight I could survive. Noise-canceling headphones would seal me off from humanity, and I could retreat into the biography of some legendary athlete. Sports biographies had become my literary comfort food. They soothed me while jet engines roared and the earth drifted by thirty thousand feet below.

    Seeking rescue from my malaise, I purchased a discounted book for a dollar.

    A dollar.

    Even at that price I felt overcharged.

    The subject was humanity’s search for belonging and meaning. On paper this sounded promising. In practice it felt like an essay stretched onto a medieval torture rack until it reached book length. Every chapter seemed padded with repetition and filler. The author’s central insight could have fit comfortably on a cocktail napkin.

    I abandoned it after a few pages.

    Disgusted with both the book and myself, I opened YouTube.

    Then salvation arrived.

    The algorithm presented a kettlebell instructor demonstrating an exercise called thrusters.

    The movement was brutal: a clean, followed by a squat, followed by an overhead press. It looked demanding, athletic, and slightly insane.

    My ennui evaporated instantly.

    I wrote the word “thrusters” into my Google Docs notebook.

    One word.

    That was all it took.

    Suddenly I was excited about tomorrow. I could picture myself waking before dawn, walking into the garage, and attempting this new movement. The anticipation generated more enthusiasm than hundreds of books, dozens of streaming shows, and an entire internet overflowing with content.

    This realization disturbed me.

    I was sixty-four years old. By all cultural expectations, I should have been entering the season of deep reading and contemplation. I should have been savoring great books the way aristocrats savor caviar. Instead, I was ricocheting around the house like a Labrador retriever waiting for someone to throw a tennis ball.

    The truth was difficult to deny. At this stage of my life, only a handful of things reliably pierced the fog. Discovering a beautiful chord progression on the piano. Finding a new kettlebell movement. Learning some technique that made me eager to wake up the next morning.

    Had YouTube not delivered that single word to me—thrusts—I might have spent the entire day wandering through a desert of boredom.

    That is what unsettled me most.

    Not that I couldn’t find a book I wanted to read.

    Not that Europe no longer called to me.

    Not even that writers themselves were abandoning books.

    What unsettled me was how little it took to reignite my enthusiasm. One word on a screen. One exercise. One tiny challenge awaiting me at dawn.

    At sixty-four, after all my reading, writing, teaching, traveling, and philosophizing, the thing that saved the day was not Bach, literature, or civilization.

    It was a kettlebell.

    A simple piece of iron kept me anchored to the tangible world of effort, fatigue, and discipline. Somewhere along the way, I realized that my mental health depended on thousands of kettlebell swings, goblet squats, cleans, and presses performed each week in the garage. That modest space had become my monastery, my therapist’s office, and my refuge. There, amid the clank of iron and the rhythm of controlled exertion, I could process the absurdities, anxieties, and distractions of modern life. The garage was the one place where the noise of the world receded and reality reasserted itself.

    The next day while enjoying the small thrill of introducing new kettlebell movements into my workout—single- and double-handed thrusters, reverse-lunge thrusters, and offset cleans—I had a podcast murmuring in the background, as I usually do. Few pleasures rival the discovery of a new exercise. It is like finding a hidden room in a house you thought you knew by heart.

    The podcast featured Bill Maher interviewing Sam Levinson, the creator of Euphoria. Levinson spoke candidly about addiction, explaining that his own began at age eleven with pharmaceuticals. Addiction, he said, would be a central theme in Euphoria’s final season because it had become one of the defining forces of modern life.

    Levinson then turned to OnlyFans. He described an industry generating revenues comparable to major entertainment sectors while gradually degrading many of the people who participate in it. The descent, he suggested, is often incremental. A few suggestive photos become a stream of content. The stream becomes a livelihood. The livelihood becomes an identity. Before long, the dream of escaping the drudgery of a conventional job transforms into something more unsettling. You become both entrepreneur and product. You begin exploiting yourself for an audience whose appetite is never fully satisfied. The result is a kind of spiritual erosion. The person becomes hollowed out, exhibiting many of the same compulsive traits associated with addiction.

    Maher agreed and argued that most people fail to grasp how profound a cultural shift OnlyFans represents. He said we now live in a “masturbation economy.”

    As I worked through a set of offset cleans, his observation lingered in my mind.

    I have spent the past several years reading about declining rates of dating, sex, marriage, and face-to-face social interaction among younger generations. Increasingly, many people appear content to retreat into simulations of intimacy that deliver pleasure without requiring vulnerability, compromise, rejection, or genuine connection.

    I was reminded of a stand-up routine by Chris Rock. Reflecting on his divorce, infidelity, and pornography addiction, Rock explained that therapy helped him recognize the damage pornography had done to his ability to connect with other people. His provocative way of describing it was that pornography had made him “autistic”—not in the clinical sense, but in the sense that he had become trapped inside his own head, detached from the emotional realities of those around him.

    Listening to Maher and Levinson, I found myself wondering whether this condition had escaped the boundaries of individual pathology and become cultural.

    What if the isolated, screen-mediated existence once associated with addiction is becoming normal?

    What if more and more people prefer substitutes to relationships, simulations to experiences, and curated fantasy to the friction of actual human life?

    What if the dystopia is not approaching but has already arrived?

    As someone who teaches critical thinking and spends an unhealthy amount of time searching for the defining themes of modern culture, I immediately began thinking about how I might frame this discussion in a classroom.

    Maher’s terminology, “the masturbation economy,” works perfectly on television. It grabs attention. It provokes. It entertains.

    But in a college classroom, I would probably use a different phrase.

    I might call it the Solitary Consumption Economy or the Self-Gratification Marketplace.

    Students could then examine the argument that platforms like OnlyFans are not merely examples of personal empowerment but symptoms of a larger cultural shift toward self-exploitation, alienation, dopamine dependency, and emotional isolation.

    Viewed this way, OnlyFans is not an anomaly. It is the logical extension of several trends that have been developing for decades.

    One precursor is the modern obsession with optimization.

    Why endure the messiness of courtship when technology can deliver a carefully curated fantasy tailored to your preferences?

    Why invest time in building a relationship when digital alternatives can be scheduled conveniently between deadlifts and protein shakes?

    Why risk rejection when algorithms offer endless affirmation?

    Optimization culture promises efficiency in every domain of life. The problem is that many of life’s most meaningful experiences are inherently inefficient. Friendship, romance, family, and community require patience, sacrifice, awkwardness, misunderstanding, and compromise. Remove those elements and you often remove the humanity as well.

    A second precursor is the social conditioning produced by the pandemic.

    Many people discovered that life could be organized around isolation. Work from home. Food delivered. Entertainment streamed. Social interaction filtered through screens. For some, this arrangement felt less like an emergency measure than a permanent upgrade. Why drive across town? Why spend money on gas? Why risk discomfort when one can remain safely cocooned inside a personalized digital environment?

    The result is a culture increasingly comfortable with substitutes.

    And the phenomenon extends far beyond sexuality.

    Today people seek fitness coaching, nutritional guidance, therapy, cooking instruction, financial advice, and life direction through screens. Entire industries now exist to provide virtual versions of activities once rooted in face-to-face relationships and local communities.

    As I thought about all this, I was reminded of an episode of Lost in Space that haunted me as a child.

    The episode, “The Promised Planet,” aired in 1968.

    The Robinson family arrives on a planet populated by perpetual teenagers. The inhabitants speak in fashionable slang, dance compulsively, and embrace a culture of endless stimulation. New arrivals are placed in individual booths where a machine bombards them with loud music and psychological conditioning until they become compliant members of the tribe.

    One of the victims is Penny Robinson.

    After undergoing the process, she stands on a platform, swaying mindlessly to the music while parroting clichés about being “with it” and “cool.” Her father watches in horror. He sees that his daughter has not merely adopted new habits. She has surrendered her individuality. She has become a consumer of slogans and sensations.

    The scene terrified me as a child.

    Watching it today is even more unsettling.

    Written nearly sixty years ago, the episode feels less like science fiction than prophecy. Its creators anticipated a world in which overstimulation, conformity, and technological manipulation would become normal features of everyday life. They imagined a generation pacified not by force but by pleasure.

    The frightening possibility is that they were not predicting some distant future.

    They were describing us.

    The Solitary Consumption Economy may simply be the latest chapter in a story that began long ago—a story in which technology gradually teaches us to prefer stimulation over connection, convenience over community, and fantasy over reality.

    The question is not whether a culture of solitary consumption can generate wealth.

    Clearly it can.

    The question is whether a civilization can flourish when increasing numbers of its citizens spend their lives alone inside their heads, consuming experiences engineered to feel more vivid while becoming steadily more detached from reality itself.

    I was hardly immune to the condition. I felt myself being slowly absorbed into a culture that inflamed the passions with dazzling digital spectacles while leaving the spirit flattened, restless, and curiously numb. At times I felt like Penny Robinson in Lost in Space, trapped inside the conditioning booth on The Promised Planet. The machine bombarded her with stimulation until she surrendered her individuality and emerged smiling, dancing, and repeating fashionable clichés. The horror of the episode was not that Penny was physically imprisoned. It was that she no longer wanted to leave. I sometimes wondered whether the same process was happening to me, only with algorithms instead of loud music, screens instead of booths, and an endless stream of digital amusements replacing the hypnotic dance floor.

    Fortunately, I had a few anchors that kept me from drifting into the hypnotic current.

    The first was kettlebells.

    Kettlebells transported me to a world before algorithms, influencers, and engagement metrics. The moment I gripped the handle, I ceased being a sixty-four-year-old college instructor and became a caveman engaged in urgent labor. I was shoving boulders aside to widen the entrance of my cave before a storm arrived. I was lifting the twelve-foot wing of a dying pterodactyl so I could retrieve the spear I had hurled moments earlier to save my life. There was no room for existential angst while trying not to drop fifty pounds of cast iron on your foot.

    Then there was the piano.

    If kettlebells connected me to my inner caveman, the piano connected me to my inner funeral director.

    Whenever I sat at the keyboard, I found myself composing the same melancholy piece over and over again. At least that is what my family claims.

    “Dad, all your songs sound the same.”

    Of course they do.

    I am not composing individual songs. I am contributing to the great collective symphony of human sadness known in German as Weltschmerz—the sorrow that comes from recognizing the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be.

    Some people spend thousands of dollars each year discussing their Weltschmerz with therapists. I process mine through an ebony Yamaha upright. It is considerably cheaper, and unlike a therapist, the piano never asks me how that makes me feel.

    The piano allowed me to grieve.

    Not merely for myself, but for the world.

    For all its absurdities, vanities, and self-inflicted wounds.

    Then there was my exercise bike.

    Technically, it is called a Schwinn Airdyne AD7.

    I prefer its proper name:

    The Misery Machine.

    The Misery Machine operates according to a simple principle: the harder you work, the more enthusiastically it punishes you for your ambition.

    Most cardio equipment is cooperative. You pedal. It politely accepts your effort.

    The AD7 is different.

    The AD7 takes your effort as a personal insult.

    Its giant fan wheel generates wind resistance proportional to your exertion, creating a relationship that feels less like exercise and more like a blood feud.

    The machine seems to say:

    “Oh, you think you’re in shape? You think you’re going to dominate this workout? Let’s investigate that claim.”

    Pedaling is only the beginning.

    Your arms must simultaneously push and pull large moving levers, transforming the experience into a full-body interrogation. Before long your legs are burning, your shoulders are aching, and your lungs are negotiating surrender terms.

    The machine possesses an almost supernatural ability to match your suffering dollar for dollar. Every attempt to overpower it simply persuades it to become more difficult.

    After a hard session, I stagger away drenched in sweat, humbled, exhausted, and oddly grateful, as though I have survived a mugging administered by a highly competent physical therapist.

    I have considered quitting the AD7 many times.

    It consumes an alarming amount of energy.

    Its location does not help.

    Wedged between the living-room wall and the sofa, it places me on public display for my family. There I sit shirtless, wearing gym shorts, with a towel wrapped around my head to prevent sweat from pouring into my eyes. I look less like a disciplined athlete than a man experiencing a minor psychological crisis.

    The real embarrassment, however, lies in the elaborate fantasies I invent to motivate myself.

    My goal is always the same: burn at least seven hundred calories in under an hour.

    To achieve this, my brain constructs increasingly ridiculous scenarios.

    Suppose I reach four hundred calories by the thirty-minute mark.

    In that case, all my colleagues receive half a million dollars tax-free.

    Naturally, they are watching me on a giant monitor.

    A scrolling ticker beneath the screen provides real-time analytics:

    Calories Per Hour: 842

    Fatigue Level: Severe

    Probability of Reaching 400 Calories at 30 Minutes: 98%

    Probability of Reaching 770 Calories at 60 Minutes: 89%

    Butt Fatigue: Catastrophic

    Confidence Level: Medium

    My colleagues watch nervously from their homes.

    “If he hits the target,” one exclaims, “I’ll finally be able to buy a house!”

    Another is already browsing beachfront property.

    A third is planning an early retirement.

    Meanwhile, I continue pedaling through escalating misery, carrying the financial hopes and dreams of people who do not know they are participating in my delusion.

    This, I suppose, is my version of mental gamification.

    Some people use productivity apps.

    Some use motivational speakers.

    I imagine an audience of financially desperate coworkers depending on my ability to survive a torture device disguised as an exercise bike.

    And somehow, absurd as it is, it works.

    Another reason I can’t quit the AD7 is that a part of me craves the punishment.

    It is difficult to overstate humanity’s appetite for self-inflicted suffering. Pain, like pleasure, has a way of making us feel intensely alive. In a culture that anesthetizes us with endless consumption, relentless marketing, algorithmic manipulation, and data mining, punishment can feel strangely restorative. At least it cuts through the fog.

    To put it more simply, without the punishment administered by my exercise bike, I would be bored.

    And boredom is no trivial enemy.

    It reminds me of Father John Misty’s song “Bored in the USA.” The narrator is a weary casualty of consumer culture, a man who has purchased so many products that he has gradually become one himself. Somewhere along the way, he misplaced the larger ambitions and romantic ideals of his youth. The life he was promised never arrived. In its place he received subscriptions, pharmaceuticals, and a collection of possessions that stare back at him with perfect indifference.

    He feels cheated.

    He wants a refund on the Faustian bargain he signed decades earlier, but he suspects the return policy has expired. To cope, he medicates himself. The pills help him endure the boredom, depression, and low-grade despair of modern life, but they cannot cure them. He is a man drowning in ennui, anhedonia, and spiritual exhaustion.

    I recognize those enemies.

    I can hear them rattling the doorknob.

    They arrive disguised as apathy, distraction, and the temptation to stop caring. They whisper that effort is pointless, that curiosity is overrated, that another hour of scrolling might somehow satisfy the hunger that scrolling itself created.

    So I fight back.

    I sit at the piano and pound out another melancholy composition dedicated to the great human tradition of Weltschmerz. I swing kettlebells until my lungs burn and my forearms ache. I climb aboard the AD7 and pedal through fresh layers of misery.

    I do these things with a mixture of fear and fury, hoping that boredom, anhedonia, and despair will decide there are easier victims elsewhere and leave me in peace for another day.

  • There Is a Bread That Never Goes Out

    There Is a Bread That Never Goes Out

    When I was five years old and living at the Royal Lanai apartments in San Jose, one of my favorite television shows was Daniel Boone. I was fascinated by Boone’s coonskin cap, especially the raccoon tail dangling from the back. To my young mind, it was the height of frontier elegance. Any man bold enough to wear a dead raccoon as a fashion accessory had to possess uncommon wisdom and imagination. Surely such a man knew secrets unavailable to ordinary people.

    One episode lodged itself permanently in my memory. In it, a destitute man lived alone in the wilderness, gaunt with hunger and desperation. A passerby took pity on him and handed him a loaf of bread. The starving man stood beneath a tree and immediately tore into it. He chewed with the ferocity of a man rescued from the edge of extinction. As he ate, he repeated a single word over and over:

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    “Bread.”

    The word became a prayer, a hymn, a declaration of gratitude. Watching him, I was struck by a revelation that only a child could find astonishing: this man’s happiness came from something as simple as a loaf of bread.

    The next day, life provided me with an opportunity for field research.

    My mother and I had gone shopping at a local plaza. Returning to the car, we loaded our groceries into the back seat, including a fresh loaf of sourdough bread. Before we left, my mother remembered seeing some white divinity and black licorice in a candy store and decided to run back inside.

    “I’ll wait in the car,” I said.

    The moment she disappeared, I launched my experiment.

    I reached into the grocery bag, tore off a chunk of sourdough, and stuffed it into my mouth. Then I began repeating the sacred word from Daniel Boone.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    Another bite.

    “Bread.”

    I was trying to recreate the miracle I had witnessed on television. I wanted to understand what it felt like to be so hungry that a loaf of bread seemed like heaven itself. I wanted to know what true satisfaction felt like.

    Nearly sixty years later, I still remember that moment.

    Something about the image continues to haunt me: the idea of profound hunger meeting simple nourishment. No luxury. No extravagance. No abundance. Just an honest need met by an honest gift.

    The proposition remains irresistible.

    The older I get, the more I understand that the episode was never really about bread.

    It was about hunger.

    The famous biblical phrase tells us that “man does not live by bread alone.” Physical hunger is only one of our appetites. Even when our stomachs are full, our mortgages paid, our homes comfortable, and our refrigerators stocked, we remain restless creatures. We hunger for purpose. We hunger for belonging. We hunger for love, friendship, meaning, beauty, and transcendence.

    We hunger for forms of bread that cannot be purchased at a bakery.

    Music is one of those forms.

    I think of “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,“ one of The Smiths’ most beautiful songs. The narrator is starving for connection. Home does not feel like home. It feels confining, lonely, and emotionally barren. He longs to escape into the world and find kindred souls who possess the warmth and vitality missing from his life. He dreams of a surrogate family, a tribe of fellow travelers who might finally make him feel understood.

    He does not know where such people are.

    He only knows he needs them.

    His longing saturates every line of the song. Beneath the wit and melancholy is a desperate appetite for belonging. He is emotionally famished.

    In that sense, he is not so different from the starving man beneath the tree in Daniel Boone.

    Both are hungry.

    Both are waiting.

    Both are searching for the thing that will finally satisfy them.

    The difference is that one seeks a loaf of bread while the other seeks companionship, love, and meaning.

    Yet the emotional experience is remarkably similar.

    A starving man dreams of bread.

    A lonely man dreams of friendship.

    And when either finally receives what he has been seeking, the response is the same. Gratitude. Relief. Fullness.

    For a brief and precious moment, the hunger stops.

    Solitude is another form of hunger.

    My mother, who struggled with clinical depression throughout her life, would sometimes disappear from the world for days at a time. She would retreat to her bedroom, pull the covers around herself, and consume novels with the same urgency that the starving man in Daniel Boone consumed his loaf of bread. Page after page disappeared into her imagination. The stories fed something that ordinary life could not. Friends would call. Invitations would come and go. My mother often chose the company of books instead. She possessed a strong reclusive streak.

    I inherited some of it.

    At times, I feel the same longing for friendship and belonging that animates “There Is a Light That Never Goes Out.” I understand the desire to find kindred spirits and become part of something larger than oneself. Yet I also understand the opposite impulse. Like my mother, there are days when I want nothing more than to be left alone with my podcasts, my kettlebell workouts, and my piano compositions. A quiet room can feel as nourishing as a crowded gathering. Solitude, when freely chosen, can be its own loaf of bread.

    Hunger takes many forms. Some people ache for companionship. Others ache for silence. Most of us spend our lives moving back and forth between the two, never fully satisfied by either and always searching for the proper measure of both.

    Perhaps religious hunger is the greatest hunger of all.

    I experienced it while watching the 1978 Superman movie. I was a teenage bodybuilder then, full of grandiose dreams and the conviction that I was destined for some undefined greatness. Sitting alone in a dark theater, I watched Superman’s father prepare his son for his mission on Earth. He explained that humanity was a lost and fallen people, wandering in confusion and ignorance. Then came the line that pierced me:

    “They only lack the light to show the way.”

    As those words echoed through the theater, something happened to me. A wave of emotion surged through my body. It felt as if a bright light had been switched on somewhere deep inside me. I began to shake. Tears streamed down my face. I was overwhelmed by a feeling I could neither explain nor resist.

    What moved me was not Superman’s strength. It was his purpose.

    For the first time, I recognized a hunger that had been living inside me all along. I wanted to be a light in the world. I wanted my life to matter. I wanted to help people find their way through confusion, loneliness, and despair. I had no idea how such a calling could be fulfilled. I only knew that the desire burned within me with an intensity I had never experienced before.

    Looking back, I think I was discovering another form of bread.

    Not the bread that fills the stomach, but the bread that nourishes the soul.

    Perhaps this is what people mean by the bread of life: the longing to serve something greater than oneself, to become useful to others, and in that act of service to discover who one truly is. The deepest hunger is not merely to consume. It is to contribute. It is to find a purpose worthy of devotion and, in pursuing it, become fully alive.

  • Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Who Controls the Story Controls the People (college essay prompt)

    Using Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, bell hooks’ essay “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” Ahmir ‘Questlove’ Thompson’s documentary Summer of Soul, and Elvis Mitchell’s documentary Is That Black Enough for You?!? as your central texts, write a 1,200-word argumentative essay analyzing the claim that art, music, film, education, and literacy function as weapons against cultural erasure and oppression.

    As you develop your argument, examine how dominant cultures maintain power not only through physical oppression and economic inequality but also through controlling memory, representation, literacy, visibility, and storytelling itself. Consider how marginalized groups are often denied the power to narrate their own existence and how reclaiming narrative ownership becomes an act of resistance, survival, and humanization.

    In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, analyze how slavery denied enslaved people literacy, birthdates, ancestry, and historical identity in order to reduce them to property rather than persons. Consider how Douglass presents reading and writing as revolutionary acts that allow him to reclaim his humanity and resist a system designed to silence him. How does his memoir itself function as an act of historical recovery and resistance against cultural erasure?

    In “Learning in the Shadow of Race and Class,” analyze how bell hooks describes education as both a pathway toward empowerment and a site of alienation, performance, and cultural conflict. How does hooks show that race and class shape access to power, belonging, and self-definition? Why do marginalized students often feel pressure to erase or reinvent parts of themselves in elite educational spaces? To what extent does education demand assimilation into dominant cultural codes?

    In Summer of Soul, analyze how the Harlem Cultural Festival celebrated Black artistry, spirituality, joy, and political consciousness during a period of racial upheaval. Why was this massive cultural event largely erased from mainstream historical memory while Woodstock became mythologized as the defining music festival of the era? How does Questlove use archival footage, music, interviews, and storytelling to recover a forgotten history and challenge the marginalization of Black cultural memory?

    In Is That Black Enough for You?!?, analyze how Elvis Mitchell critiques Hollywood’s long history of reducing Black identity to stereotypes while marginalizing Black filmmakers, actors, and stories. How did Black cinema in the 1960s and 1970s challenge Hollywood’s control over representation? How does Mitchell argue that recovering overlooked Black films and artists becomes an act of cultural restoration and resistance against historical erasure?

    As part of your argument, analyze not only the ideas presented in these works but also the rhetorical and artistic methods used by the creators themselves. Consider how autobiography, music, archival footage, imagery, storytelling, editing, voice, and film structure shape audience perception and resist cultural invisibility.

    You must also address at least one counterargument. For example, some critics may argue that art, music, and representation alone are insufficient forms of resistance because symbolic visibility does not necessarily produce economic equality, political power, or institutional change. Others may argue that mainstream culture eventually commodifies resistance movements and transforms them into profitable entertainment. Respond to these objections by evaluating the actual power and limitations of cultural expression.

    As you conclude your essay, consider the larger implications of narrative control. Why do oppressive systems repeatedly attempt to regulate literacy, storytelling, education, historical memory, and representation? What happens to individuals and societies when marginalized groups lose the power to preserve and narrate their own histories? Finally, consider how modern digital culture, social media, AI, and algorithm-driven entertainment continue to shape which voices are amplified, marginalized, archived, or forgotten.

    For your introductory paragraph, explain how the struggle for the dominant narrative is presented in the documentary We Beat the Dream Team and how the film shows that battles over narrative power extend far beyond race into many areas of culture. Analyze how individuals and groups compete to control public memory, define legitimacy, shape historical perception, and claim symbolic victory. Show how the documentary demonstrates that the fight for the dominant narrative is ultimately a struggle over identity, status, recognition, and cultural power.

    Requirements:

    • 1,200 words minimum
    • MLA format
    • MLA Works Cited page with 5 sources
    • Use evidence from all five texts
    • Include a clear thesis with mapping components
    • Include at least one counterargument and rebuttal
    • Analyze specific scenes, passages, quotations, or examples rather than merely summarizing
    • Develop a focused argument about the relationship between narrative ownership, cultural memory, identity, and power

  • The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    The Heartbreak of Micky Dolenz

    My parents liked to remind me that before IBM rescued my father with a job offer and transplanted us from Florida to California, we were so poor they sold blood to hospitals to help feed me. This family anecdote was repeated with the solemn gravity of frontier folklore, as though I had survived the Donner Party rather than early childhood. We lived in military housing in Gainesville called Flavet Villages, a collection of dreary barracks-style tenements that seemed permanently damp, exhausted, and spiritually defeated. Cockroaches crawled openly along the walls beside my crib as though they too paid rent and felt entitled to common areas.

    Nearby sat an alligator swamp whose odor drifted across the housing complex with biblical hostility. Around dawn and twilight especially, the air became thick with a feculent stench that smelled like Satan’s compost bin after a seafood boil. The swamp seemed less a natural ecosystem than a punishment assigned to the poor. Everything about Flavet Villages communicated scarcity, mildew, resignation, and the understanding that comfort belonged to other people living elsewhere.

    Then came the phone call from IBM.

    Just like that, our trajectory changed. My father packed us into a late-1950s Mercury and drove westward toward what had not yet become Silicon Valley but was already beginning to hum with technological ambition and California mythology. We rolled down Highway 101, exited at Tully Road in San Jose, and arrived at what, to our eyes, looked less like an apartment complex than a tropical resurrection.

    The Royal Lanai apartments embodied that distinctly mid-century California fantasy in which ordinary suburban housing attempted to impersonate a Polynesian resort through sheer landscaping optimism. The place radiated the confidence of an era convinced that lava rock, palm trees, and decorative stonework could transport middle-class renters into an exotic island paradise situated conveniently between a supermarket and a freeway exit.

    Dark volcanic rocks framed the walkways. Palmettos and fan palms swayed above flowerbeds bursting with oversized sunflowers and dense tropical greenery. The buildings themselves were decorated with rough lava stone and jagged field rock embedded into the stucco, as though cooled magma had erupted directly into suburban San Jose. Sprinklers hissed across the landscaping in the evening light while the California sun reflected warmly against the black volcanic stone.

    Compared to Flavet Villages, the Royal Lanai felt impossibly glamorous.

    We had crossed from swamp funk to Polynesian fantasy.

    From cockroaches to lava rock.

    From survival to aspiration.

    And though we were still renters living in an apartment complex beside a busy road, to my parents it must have felt as though IBM had not merely offered employment but delivered us personally into the American Dream wearing a short-sleeve dress shirt and carrying a briefcase.

    The monthly pilgrimage to the manager’s office to pay the rent filled my mother with a kind of triumphant delight. She treated the occasion less like a financial obligation and more like admission into respectable civilization. Before leaving the apartment, she would proudly hold up the giant green circular keychain embossed with our apartment number, the metal house key dangling from it like a sacred relic proving we belonged at the Royal Lanai. Then she would invite me to accompany her on the journey as though we were visiting royalty rather than paying one hundred dollars for another month of tenancy.

    The rent itself seemed magical in its perfect roundness: exactly one hundred dollars. Not ninety-eight. Not one hundred and seven. One hundred dollars precisely, as if the evenness of the number confirmed the elegance of our new life beneath the palms and lava rock.

    At five years old, I found these expeditions endlessly fascinating because nearly everything at the Royal Lanai felt luxurious compared to the swampy deprivation stories my parents told about Florida. The manager’s office in particular possessed the aura of a tiny tropical embassy of abundance. Behind the desk sat Betty, the matronly apartment manager, smiling with the patient warmth of a woman who had seen thousands of tenants pass through her domain and knew exactly how much the place meant to young families trying to ascend into middle-class respectability.

    Inside the office stood a humming water cooler beside neat stacks of tiny paper cups that I treated with almost ceremonial reverence. Nearby sat a glass jar overflowing with sugar cubes, and Betty always assured me they were mine for the taking. This struck me as extraordinary generosity. To a small child raised on stories of blood-selling poverty and cockroach-infested tenements, unlimited cold water and unrestricted access to sugar felt like evidence that we had entered a realm of unimaginable prosperity.

    The Royal Lanai seemed less like an apartment complex than a perpetual vacation for ordinary people. Everything shimmered with promise: the tropical landscaping, the black lava rocks warming beneath the California sun, the palms rustling overhead, the miraculous availability of chilled water and refined sugar whenever my childish whims demanded them. In my mind, paradise was not complicated. Paradise was a paper cup of cold water, two stolen sugar cubes melting on your tongue, and a giant green keychain proving your family had finally escaped the swamp.

    The monthly rent at the Royal Lanai took my parents a while to psychologically absorb. One hundred dollars a month may sound quaint now, but to them it carried the emotional weight of financing Versailles. To diffuse their anxiety, they invented an elaborate family joke that my mother might soon have to supplement my father’s IBM salary by returning to her former career as a flaming sword swallower in the circus.

    According to the mythology they constructed for my benefit, my mother had toured the circus circuit in Alaska before meeting my father. She was apparently a celebrated performer capable of swallowing blazing sabers while balancing on elephants or dangling from trapezes over crowds of drunken laborers eating salted peanuts. To authenticate the story, my parents explained that my mother remained close friends with the circus CEO herself, a powerful woman named Mrs. Dimes, who spent her days inside a cramped trailer-office counting ticket sales with ruthless concentration.

    “Do you want to hear Mrs. Dimes counting the tickets?” they would ask me with theatrical seriousness.

    Then they would direct me toward our heavy avocado-green rotary telephone and instruct me to dial P-O-P-C-O-R-N.

    What I did not understand, of course, was that this connected me to Northern California’s famous “Popcorn Lady,” the automated time service whose calm robotic voice announced the time every ten seconds. My parents convinced me this was Mrs. Dimes tallying circus receipts somewhere deep inside carnival headquarters while deciding whether my mother needed to return to sword swallowing in order to save the family finances.

    For a while I found the whole thing mesmerizing.

    I imagined Mrs. Dimes sitting beneath a dangling light bulb in a smoky trailer counting endless piles of tickets while tigers roared outside and exhausted clowns smoked cigarettes beside cages. The fact that my mother possessed a direct line to the upper management of the circus filled me with awe. It made adulthood seem precarious and theatrical at the same time, as though our entire middle-class existence hung by a thread and one poorly considered supermarket purchase could force my mother to pack her bags and rejoin the carnival economy.

    At first, the game amused me.

    Then one evening, something shifted.

    Perhaps I had become old enough to detect the real anxiety lurking beneath the comedy. Perhaps the repeated references to money finally penetrated my five-year-old understanding. Whatever the reason, the thought of my mother leaving us to join the circus suddenly struck me as horrifyingly plausible.

    I began sobbing uncontrollably.

    The image of her disappearing into some distant caravan of sword swallowers, ticket counters, and exhausted acrobats overwhelmed me completely. My parents immediately abandoned the Mrs. Dimes routine and never played the game again.

    But by then the damage had been done.

    Even at five years old, I had absorbed the terrible adult knowledge that paradise could be lost, that money was fragile, and that somewhere beyond the lava rocks and palm trees of the Royal Lanai lurked the possibility that your mother might have to run away and join the circus to pay the rent.

    It was then that I resolved to prepare myself for the inevitable by joining the circus alongside my mother. If financial catastrophe struck and Mrs. Dimes summoned her back beneath the big top, I would not remain behind abandoned at the Royal Lanai like some emotionally shattered civilian. No. I would reinvent myself as the Strongman: a towering muscular brute in leopard tights capable of snapping chains across his chest, bending steel bars, and hoisting wild animals above his head while astonished crowds applauded beneath clouds of cigarette smoke and popcorn dust.

    My spiritual mentors were not priests or philosophers but superhero comics. The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Prince Namor became my prophets of muscular transcendence. Their impossible physiques convinced me that strength was not merely aesthetic but salvific. Muscles could rescue families. Biceps could repel humiliation. Triceps might even keep your mother from disappearing into itinerant circus labor.

    I therefore began training with whatever equipment the apartment provided. My parents’ heavy lacquered ceramic ashtrays became dumbbells. Luggage became resistance equipment. Every object in the apartment was reinterpreted through the feverish logic of childhood bodybuilding ambition. Somewhere between the lava rocks and the sunflower gardens of the Royal Lanai, I became convinced that physical strength was the answer to economic instability, emotional terror, and perhaps existence itself.

    Then came the Charles Atlas ads.

    Those advertisements struck me with the force of religious revelation. There was always the same tragic spectacle: a scrawny weakling being publicly humiliated at the beach while some square-jawed bully kicked sand in his face and stole his girlfriend with the efficiency of a hostile corporate takeover. But then the runt discovered the Charles Atlas system, trained with evangelical discipline, and returned transformed into a muscular avenger. The bully was defeated. The girl was reclaimed. Cosmic balance was restored. Civilization itself seemed to exhale in relief.

    The moral architecture of the universe suddenly became clear to me:
    Train hard. Build yourself. Never surrender. Muscles are destiny.

    This, I believed, was the true American Dream—not suburban comfort or upward mobility, but the ability to transform fear and humiliation into brute force through relentless self-improvement.

    If things became desperate enough, I could save my family.

    I could become the Strongman.

    My mother and I would travel the circus together, inseparable beneath the glow of carnival lights. We would swallow flames, bend steel, astonish crowds, and most importantly, pay the one-hundred-dollar rent on time. We would not be poor swamp people from Florida anymore. We would be winners.

    Thanks to an early literary diet of children’s books, superhero comics, and Charles Atlas advertisements, I grew up convinced that sheer grit and industriousness could conquer virtually anything. My optimism floated through childhood with absurd buoyancy, like a kite somehow suspended in a windless sky by pure American self-help mythology. I had absorbed the sugary gospel of Captain Kangaroo and internalized the moral propaganda of The Little Engine That Could with cult-like devotion. “I think I can” was not merely a line from a children’s story. It was my private war cry. Positive thinking plus relentless effort was supposed to produce triumph, prosperity, admiration, and perhaps eventually heroic forearms.

    Or so I believed.

    Then came October 16, 1967—twelve days before my sixth birthday—the evening my worldview suffered catastrophic structural failure while watching my beloved The Monkees. The episode was titled “I Was a 99-lb. Weakling,” and it detonated inside my young psyche like a philosophical pipe bomb. Until then, I had believed life operated according to comic-book justice: work hard, improve yourself, defeat the bully, reclaim the girl, restore cosmic order. But this episode introduced me to a far darker force, one nobody had warned me about because I was still too young to grasp the terminology.

    Irony.

    Not ordinary disappointment. Not bad luck. Irony—the grinning sadist of human existence that waits until you have exhausted yourself climbing the mountain before informing you the mountain has moved.

    The episode features my slender, goofy hero Micky Dolenz being publicly humiliated by Bulk, a grotesquely muscular beach tyrant played by none other than Dave Draper, a man built less like a human being than a refrigerated side of beef. Bulk steals Brenda, the bikini-clad beach goddess, directly from Micky’s orbit while radiating the effortless confidence of a man whose chest measurements could destabilize nearby weather systems.

    Desperate to reclaim his dignity, Micky joins Weaklings Anonymous and submits himself to a punishing training regimen worthy of Cold War experimentation. He lifts weights the size of Buicks. He gulps down fermented goat milk curd, a substance that appeared to possess the texture and emotional flavor profile of liquefied despair. Worst of all, he sells his drum set to finance his transformation, placing the future of the Monkees themselves in jeopardy. Everything is sacrificed on the altar of self-improvement.

    And why?

    Because the Charles Atlas narrative promised salvation.

    Suffer now. Train hard. Become magnificent later.

    Micky returns to the beach transformed into a muscular Adonis, his arms swollen, his confidence restored, fully prepared to reclaim Brenda and reestablish moral equilibrium in the universe.

    But then Irony arrives carrying a baseball bat.

    During Micky’s transformation into Hercules, Brenda has grown bored with physical brutes. Muscles are now gauche. Predictable. Vulgar. She has pivoted dramatically toward intellectualism and now desires a frail, pencil-necked pseudo-scholar whose chief accomplishment appears to be reading In Search of Lost Time at the beach while ignoring sunlight and human joy. The new object of her affection sits there clutching Proust with all the erotic magnetism of a graduate seminar on French memory theory.

    Apparently, somewhere between Micky’s bench presses and fermented goat secretions, the cultural winds had shifted.

    Bodybuilders were out.

    Pretentious literary anemia was in.

    As I watched Micky’s heartbreak unfold onscreen, my own little heart cracked alongside his. Every lesson I had absorbed about hard work, perseverance, and self-discipline suddenly felt suspect. The universe, I realized, did not necessarily reward effort. You could labor heroically, endure humiliation, drink industrial quantities of goat sludge, and still discover that reality had changed the rules while you were busy training.

    The revelation devastated me.

    It was like discovering that Santa Claus was not merely fictional but actively mocking you from behind the curtains of existence.

    After that episode, childhood optimism no longer felt trustworthy. The clean moral geometry of comic books dissolved. From then on, I wandered through life carrying the vague existential sadness of a tiny philosopher betrayed by television comedy. Somewhere deep inside me, Micky Dolenz was still standing on that beach holding his rebuilt muscles while Brenda walked away with a man reading Proust.

  • The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    The Cologne, the Q-Tip, and the Bronzed Tyrant: A Memoir Without Euphemism

    When Tom Junod discussed his memoir with Andrew Sullivan, he described a decision that feels almost subversive now: no contemporary therapy-speak. No “toxic masculinity,” no diagnostic shorthand, no tidy labels to anesthetize the mess. A book set in the ’60s and ’70s would speak in the idiom of those years. The wager is simple and risky: if you refuse the crutch of modern jargon, the character has to carry the weight. By that measure, Junod wins. He builds a father who does what Dashiell Hammett demanded of fiction—gets up, steps off the page, and stands there, unavoidable.

    The book—In the Days of My Youth I Was Told What It Means to be a Man—borrows its title from the Led Zeppelin song “Good Times Bad Times,” and the borrowing is apt. Junod’s father, Lou, is less a man than a doctrine delivered at high volume. He is a born pontificator with a salesman’s grin and a peacock’s vanity. He scents himself like a department store—colognes, sprays, balms layered into a cloud—and tans his body into a lacquered bronze that seems to announce itself before he enters a room. He sells handbags, favors turtlenecks, and at the beach reduces himself to a strip of fabric and a glare. He cleans his navel with a witch-hazel-dipped Q-tip and instructs his son to follow suit, as if hygiene were a moral philosophy.

    Compulsion runs through him like a live wire. If you prefer a term to describe his sexual compulsions, call it satyriasis and be done with it, but the word hardly captures the sprawl: gambling, philandering, bullying—habits that bloom into a personality. A man who cannot govern himself makes governance his obsession; he attempts to administer his household the way a tyrant administers a province—loudly, relentlessly, and with a curious conviction that control is the same thing as order. The result is a home pressurized to the point of fatigue, where even silence feels like a reprimand.

    Junod’s refusal to retrofit his childhood with modern language sharpens the pain rather than softening it. There’s a scene that lands like a held breath finally released: in Lou’s absence, the mother reappears as herself. Her face opens. Her voice steadies. When Tom reads her a poem, she brightens—really brightens—and offers the simplest, most generous counsel: read it aloud; the sound will teach you what the page cannot. It is a small moment, but it reveals the scale of what has been missing. When Lou is present, he occupies the air itself. He doesn’t just enter rooms; he consumes them, a man with a gift for turning oxygen into pressure.

    Listen to the audiobook—as Sullivan sensibly suggests—and Lou’s voice acquires a second life. You don’t merely read him; you hear the cadence, the certainty, the unearned authority. It is a performance you cannot switch off, which is precisely the point. The book’s power comes from that persistence. It is painful, yes, but the pain is disciplined into narrative momentum.

    If the experience feels familiar, it should. The era produced a certain model of man—postwar, unapologetic, loud as a virtue—who treated appetite as remedy and certainty as proof. He read “women’s magazines” out in the open, said things he couldn’t defend, and considered objection to his will a breach of etiquette. The code was simple: be emphatic, be unyielding, be right by volume. Junod doesn’t argue with that code; he incarnates it. He takes the template and gives it a name, a voice, a set of rituals so specific they become unforgettable.

    In doing so, he offers a quiet rebuke to our current habit of explanation. You don’t need a glossary to understand this man. You need a page, a room, and the patience to watch what happens when he walks in.